That’s a potentially defamatory statement but if I ever get sued by a litigious group of American dairy farmers or their cows, I think I’d have the proof to defend myself in court.
According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), 75 per cent of US calves are raised in individual pens or hutches.
The calves are separated from their mothers and put into a little pen with a shelter at one end and milk teat or bucket at the other end. They spend their first eight weeks in this pen by themselves until weaning.
In the 1960s, psychologist Harry Harlow experimented with a group of infant monkeys. He raised half the monkeys with their mothers and the other half of the infant monkeys were given a dummy mother, essentially a puppet.
When the monkeys with the dummy mothers grew up, they showed abnormal social behaviours, learning difficulties and they were generally more fearful.
These monkeys had what psychologists call a neurocognitive deficit. In short, they had impaired brain development and were not acting as normal monkeys should.
Professor Nina von Keyserlingk and her team at the University of British Columbia have done some interesting research around the cognition of calves raised in different environments.
They took three groups of calves. The first were individually housed in the typical US fashion, the second group were housed in a group with other calves. This is the standard practice on New Zealand farms.
The third group were allowed to stay with their mothers overnight, but the mother cows wore a “bra” so the calves couldn’t suckle.
These calves were trained to enter a small arena. They had to hit a button on the wall with their heads to start the exercise. They were then trained to go to a computer screen at the other end of the arena and touch the screen with their heads. If the screen turned white, the calf could get a milk treat at the other end of the arena.
If the screen turned red they had to go back and start the exercise again. If the screen was red and the calf approached the teat and tried to get the milk treat, they were put into a “time out” pen, which the calves disliked.
After four days of training, the calves in all groups were picking it up and by day seven, all of the calves were completing the task correctly. They had learned, white screen means they get a milk treat, red screen means no treat.
But then the researchers turned the tables on the calves. Now the red screen meant the calf could get a milk treat and the white screen meant no treat.
On the first day, 100 per cent of the calves from all groups got the exercise wrong.
Halfway through the second day, the calves in the group housing environments were beginning to understand the change. By day seven, all of the group housed calves were completing the task correctly.
But the calves housed individually could not work it out. After seven days, only 20 per cent of this group could understand the change. So they extended the experiment for another seven days with no change in the results.
These calves were not able to modify what they had already learned. They were essentially inflexible.
They did further experiments with new feed types and measured the amount eaten in a set time period.
The calves were individually given hay and carrots, feeds they had never seen before. The calves from group environments ate twice as much.
The reason for this is the individually housed calves took twice as long to pluck up the courage to investigate the new feeds and therefore had less actual eating time.
These results were similar to what Harry Harlow had found in his primate experiments. The monkeys with puppet mothers were more anxious and fearful.
It seems to be true for calves as well.
It’s not surprising that you put a baby of any type in a pen by itself, with no socialisation and its brain doesn’t develop properly. Hardly a shocking insight, really.
This potentially means that a majority of US dairy cows are neurologically impaired and are not behaving as normal cows should.
It’s feasible to suggest that everything US farmers think is true about a cow, might be based on cows operating at only a fraction of their full potential.
