Although ammonia from cow waste does not directly contribute to climate change, when it seeps into the soil it becomes nitrous oxide, the third most polluting greenhouse gas. To prevent this indirect damage, on a farm in Germany they have taught cows to go to the bathroom.
The goal is simple: to prevent the accumulation of waste from cows’ waste, excrement and urine that combine to generate ammonia, a gas that contaminates the soil and local watercourses.
Ammonia produced in cow waste does not directly contribute to climate change, but when filtered into the soil microbes convert it to nitrous oxide, the third most important greenhouse gas after methane and dioxide. of carbon. Agriculture is the largest source of ammonia emissions, and livestock accounts for more than half of that contribution.
The idea is from an international team of researchers from the Farm Animal Biology Research Institute (FBN) in Germany and the University of Auckland (New Zealand) and details are published today in the journal Current Biology.
The study has shown that cows can be trained to go to the bathroom, which allows them to collect and treat waste, keep the stable clean, reduce air pollution and create more open and animal-friendly farms.
“It is usually assumed that livestock are not able to control defecation or urination, but livestock, like many other animals or farm animals, are quite intelligent and can learn a lot. Why they will not be able to learn to to use the toilet? ”asks Jan Langbein, FBN animal psychologist and lead author of the study.
To teach calves to defecate, the researchers devised “MooLoo” training, which basically consisted of rewarding calves when urinating in the latrine and getting them to associate urinating outside the latrine with an unpleasant experience. .
“As punishment, we first used headphones on our ears and played a very unpleasant sound every time they urinated outside. We thought this would punish the animals, not too aversively, but they didn’t care. In the end, a water tile worked well as a mild deterrent, ”Langbein explains.
Within a few weeks, researchers had trained eleven of the sixteen calves on the farm that surprisingly showed a level of performance comparable to that of children and higher than that of very young children.
Now that researchers know how to train cows to do their needs, they want to transfer their results to real farms and ranchers with the intention that “in a few years all the cows will go to the bathroom,” Langbein concludes.