Scientists have accomplished what many thought impossible: They’ve taught nearly a dozen calves, which normally pee and poop at random, to “hold it” and urinate in a specific location. ScienceMagArchives
“Why not just potty train the cows?” That’s what a radio jockey asked animal behaviorist Lindsay Matthews during a 2007 interview about how cow urine harms the environment. The question was in jest, but it got Matthews—a researcher at the University of Auckland—thinking. Now, nearly 14 years later, he and colleagues have accomplished what many thought impossible: They’ve taught nearly a dozen calves, which normally pee and poop at random, to “hold it” and urinate in a specific location.
That’s where Matthews came in. A few years after his radio interview, he was chatting with colleagues about a problem he coined the “climate killer conundrum.” Since the early 2000s, farmers in Europe and other regions had moved from chaining dairy cows in a barn or confining them in small stalls to giving them more room to roam indoors. But now, instead of the urine and feces from dozens of animals going straight into an easy-to-clean trench, it slopped all over the concrete floors.
In phase one of the potty training, the team gave 16 Holstein calves a diuretic before confining each one to the MooLoo. The animals were rewarded with food whenever they urinated. After 10 to 30 tries, 10 calves learned to associate peeing with the treat: They turned to the food window right after urinating —sometimes midstream. “They learned really quickly,” Langbein says.
Jeffrey Rushen, an animal behaviorist at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, whose own team separately—essentially phase one of the current study—calls the new work “the essential next step.” But as farmers are likely to balk at potty training hundreds of cows, researchers will need to find a way to automate the process, he says, perhaps with moisture sensors and automated treat dispensers. They’ll also need to expand the training to pooping.
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