A couple of days after the swank, tradition-filled IgNobel
award ceremonies, the new laureates gather at MIT for the standing-room-only Ig
Informal Lectures. During the awards ceremony each laureate gets only a minute
for their acceptance speech, so the Informal Lectures are where they actually
get the chance to explain themselves. They still have to be succinct: each
lecture is only 5 minutes long, and Miss Sweetie-Poo lurks in the wings to cut
off any laureate who heads into overtime.
This year, the first speaker was Peter Rowlinson, one of the winners of the 2009 Ig Nobel for Veterinary Medicine. Rowlinson and his coauthor Catherine Douglas showed that cows that are named give more milk than cows that are only known as numbers. (Their work was published in the March 2009 issue of Anthrozoos.) It’s only a little more milk – a couple of liters on average – but in a large herd of dairy cattle it adds up. And that, he pointed out, translates to real money.
In his lecture, Rowlinson took pains to point out that it wasn’t the naming per se that made the cows more productive – instead, he says, “the name is indicative of the stockman’s relationship with the cattle.” In short, farmers that give positive, personal attention to each of their cows are rewarded with better milk production.
What’s more, that care doesn’t have to cost the farmer anything but a little time. Another part of the same study was a controlled experiment that compared the behavior of young cows that were given positive attention (head scratches and the like) in addition to their normal care to that of cows which had simply been given the normal rounds of feed, vaccinations, and dewormings. They found that the animals that had positive experiences with humans during their first year of life grew into cows that were more relaxed around people. And relaxed cows give more milk. Cows are fundamentally prey animals, and if they only associate people with a sharp needle poke in the flank, they're understandably nervous around the farmer who is trying to milk them. Stress causes physiological changes in organ systems cow-wide, using up energy that might otherwise be used for making milk. But a cow that thinks she might get a good scratching behind the ears will apparently walk right up to the milking station without wasting any time or energy in worrying about it. So being good to the animals isn't just good for the cows, it's also good for the farmer.
Image of Holstein by Keith Weller, (via USDA)
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