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Researchers successfully potty-train cows
- h2odragon 5y agoThat's cool! There's still drawbacks to keeping cows as house pets, they take up an entire couch even when small and cute, and they never lose the desire to be in your lap.
- harpersealtako 5y agoI wonder how long it will be before someone breeds a miniature cow like those mini pigs you sometimes hear about.
- h2odragon 5y agoThere's plenty on craigslists, but beware the ones that are "mini" because they're starved while young. They can still be fine pets and healthy animals but they're not worth what a breeding mini can be.
- ceejayoz 5y ago> “These animals are capable of much more than we ask of them.” I fear part of that capacity is to understand the horrors they're frequently subject to in industrial feed lots. I still eat meat, but I'm increasingly uncomfortable with that fact.
- wyager 5y agoI would be interested in a program to breed farm animals to be as stupid as possible. If we could give cows the intelligence level of a chicken, for example, I would feel better about eating them.
- cogman10 5y agoAren't you effectively describing lab meat? Bio-reactors are pretty stupid.
- Diggsey 5y agoJust going to leave this here... https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/piers-anthony/47321-in_the_barn.html https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/piers-anthony/47321-in_the_b...
- xgulfie 5y agoChickens aren't as stupid as you seem to think
- z3ncyberpunk 5y agoThey are also vicious, cannibalistic, practically unchanged dinosaurs like alligators. Don't feel too bad for them
- apetresc 5y agoThey're vicious and cannibalistic when subjected to the stresses of existing on factory farms. I feel plenty bad for them.
- noasaservice 5y agoHumans are nearly the same when exhibited the similar conditions (US jails and prisons).
- Ekaros 5y agoOr target is not part of same tribe, see exploitation, wars, drone strikes etc...
- z3ncyberpunk 5y agoAaaaand your point? Humans are all of these things without being subject to such conditions as jails, war, or enslavement. And while US prisons have no shortage of terrible faults, most prisons around the world are far worse both in their living conditions and their treatment of prisoners, so no idea why you're choosing a single out US prisons specifically.
- steve_adams_86 5y agoI went on a philosophy bent for some reason years ago and read a bunch of popular philosophy reads to get a sense of what that space is. I still read a lot of philosophy but much less obsessively. One of the things it did to me was totally transform my perception of animals, humans as animals, our relationships, and cause to me to realize I have no way to verify that animals don’t experience life in a way that’s as meaningful or as sentient as mine. I can’t even properly define those things. I do know that I share a LOT with mammals especially and they appear to possess a lot of the faculties required to feel good, suffer, have temporal awareness, relationships with other animals, etc. That’s not what was taught to me as a child. I like to go spear fishing and that’s a very changed experience. I learned how to originally so I could be more selective about food and where I harvest it, reduce bycatch, etc. So I cared before to some degree. Now shooting a fish involves this internal struggle of deciding if it’s necessary, if it makes sense, what it means about me, what the experience will be like for the fish. It feels a lot more like killing someone rather than something. I guess that sounds silly. It’s a rabbit hole. You can go down so far and maybe not turn up much that’s very useful. I think animals aren’t very discernible from human animals in the big picture though. I’m basically a murderer, but the legally sanctioned kind. I bought the license. I strongly prefer to eat the food I murdered myself now. I occasionally eat farmed meat, but it’s rare and comes from local farms with unscalable high standards. I’m fortunate that I can do that. I mostly do it to appease my family - they feel weird when I skip dishes at special meals. Anyway I wanted to share that because this thought experiment about the experience of animals in farms means a lot to me lately, and I find it all fascinating but important as well. Like you, I’m increasingly uncomfortable with it.
- yboris 5y ago> It feels a lot more like killing someone rather than something. I guess that sounds silly. No it does not. Animals and fish are sentient beings with their own set of perceptions, feelings, thoughts, desires, and more. I do not think there is a defensible way to consume animals if you're living on above-poverty wages in a developed country and don't have some extremely rare health problem. Killing is problematic (ending a life prematurely), but worse yet is the experience animals have on factory farms. In your case of hunting your own fish seems less morally problematic than most animal consumption, but I understand the sentiment of "do I really need to eat that when there are plenty of non-sentient alternatives". Thank you for sharing your thoughts!
- vmception 5y agoCan you explain that feeling to me? I have been fully aware of the intelligence the whole time, and have just found the prior scientific consensus to be silly and now I keep running into people that say something like "ah ! they are intelligent! I lost my appetite" like... what? how or why is that related, to you. how is that the line in the sand. feel like I took acid and got stuck in this weird mostly similar dimension.
- xboxnolifes 5y agoWell, let me engage with asking more questions. Would you be ok with killing another human to consume in a non-emergency scenario? If yes, then I understand your confusion. If not, then why not? Is it legal repercussions? Do you worry that you may upset the people who care about them? Is it just an ingrained idea that eating human bad, but eating animal good? Why is eating a human different than eating another animal? Alternative question around a similar idea: does picking asparagus or cutting down a tree give similar feelings as gutting an animal for meat?
- nightski 5y agoSelf preservation. I am uneasy with killing a human for food because that means they could kill me for food. It is unlikely I will be killed by a cow anytime soon.
- Zigurd 5y agoI have no strict dietary limitations, but, for a confluence of reasons, have cut out regular consumption of meat: Climate impact, maintaining healthy weight, avoiding a logey feeling after a heavy meal, food safety, etc. all factor-in to not eating meat regularly. It started as a lockdown thing, but the way it seems to have helped weight loss was a big incentive to continue.
- notJim 5y agoFor me, lab grown meat can't come soon enough. I've reduced my meat consumption, but I really do enjoy it, and don't like the idea of giving it up entirely.
- sjwalter 5y ago"Lab grown" is a marketing term that actually means "highly-processed plant-based food-like substance created in a factory". Anybody claiming that highly-processed things like this will have anything close to the same health impact and taste as, say, pasture-raised chickens (like I raise on my farm, https://mulligan.farm https://mulligan.farm) is falling into the same trap that my parents fell into when they became convinced that hydrogenated factory-produced oils were healthier than butter.
- curuinor 5y agothere's the plant-based stuff and there's the stuff that's genetically indistinguishable from meat. the plant-based stuff is available right now, the genetic meat stuff is not available for ordinary consumption because it's too expensive and there's a few material hurdles
- sjwalter 5y agoThat argument falls apart quite quickly with just a little thought. The taste and nutritive quality of meat has many, many factors going into it, and the genes are only one tiny part. For example, the amount of omega-3s in pasture-raised chicken, and their ratio to omega-6s is far better in pasture-raised chickens than in chickens subjected to confined animal feeding operations (https://apppa.org/The-Nutrition-of-Pasture-Raised-Chicken-and-Meats https://apppa.org/The-Nutrition-of-Pasture-Raised-Chicken-an...). My chickens are of the same genetics as gross grocery store chickens, but grow more slowly, get more exercise, require zero antibiotics, have vastly different flavour and nutritive quality, than those exact same genetics raised in factory farms. The experience an animal has walking the earth--what kind of activities they engage in, what they eat, what they breath, what pharmaceuticals they're injected with--all have impact on the value of the meat. What does "lab grown" even mean in this context? Sure, it's genetically identical, but what "lab environment" produces something like grain-finished meat? Which produces 100% grassfed beef? It seems insanely simplistic to say that "we can grow this phenotype in the lab, so it'll be exactly the same as one raised in a barn or on a pasture."
- typon 5y agoI've stopped eating beef/mutton since the start of corona. I still eat chicken/fish, but honestly it wasn't that hard. Most restaurants have good chicken/seafood/vegetarian options, and at home you can control what you eat. Give it a try, I can honestly say I feel much better (diet wise and psychologically)
- ssully 5y agoI did the same thing around 2019. We do chicken once or twice a week, and I'll some kind of chicken or turkey cold cuts around for lunch sandwiches. It honestly wasn't very difficult.
- cmckn 5y agoMy perspective on this was shifted significantly by a college course focusing on the (un)sustainability of modern consumption. If you’re interested, check out Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. I still eat meat, and don’t really plan on stopping; but I am now less precious about pets and more respectful of livestock. edit: PDF of the book: https://bc.instructure.com/courses/1745066/files/115253047?module_item_id=34864917 https://bc.instructure.com/courses/1745066/files/115253047?m...
- ashtonkem 5y agoWe get all our beef from a farm nearby, grass fed & finished for this exact reason. Industrial feed lots are really, really bad.
- asdff 5y agoI think what gives me peace at night, ironically, is the knowledge that there is no facet of my or anyone elses modern life that doesn't result in terrible harm to the natural state of the earth. If I quit eating meat its like great and I can pat myself on the back, but they are still going to have slaughterhouses, or clearcut rainforests for soy beans, or strip mine mountains for lithium for all the junk I have to buy to be a productive member of this society so I can afford to keep myself sheltered and fed. I have zero agency at all to do anything about that. I've let go of feeling like I have to fix it, because solving these institutional issues is ultimately not my job and that sense of worry will never be relieved in my lifetime, because once again I have no personal agency to affect institutional change. Us peasants in history exists to live and die as units of labor beholden to a course charted by people ordained since birth to command that ship, and its a fallacy to ever imagine that we might ourselves take the helm and steer ourselves to logically rational utopian waters free of emotional biases. Instead of fighting upstream fruitlessly until you die restless, chase personal hedonism within your lifetime and means as much as possible.
- elmomle 5y agoThere are actions you can take to reduce your negative impact. For example, you reduce your ecological footprint by reducing or eliminating meat from your diet. In the net it reduces the amount of farmland your existence requires--remember, those animals you eat need to eat things too, and plant -> you is a much more efficient way of converting farmland into sustenance than plant -> animal -> you.
- asdff 5y agoI just don't think that my individual choice does anything when the issues are systemic and entrenched at this point. Whether I buy a pack of sausages a week or not, the grocery store orders the same amount of meat and probably just throws away what doesn't sell, the taco truck buys the same amount of meat whether I go there this week or not. What would do something is if literally everyone in the entire city did it, but that's a fantasy.
- 7952 5y ago
- zeku 5y agoI've recently become vegetarian because of this. I just can't justify the lives of these animals just so I can eat a burger that is only 25% better than an impossible burger or whatever. I'm not against making animals work for us, but I think they need to be treated with a level of dignity that their lives deserve. Currently find myself in-between meat eating and vegan camps so I don't make a lot of friends with this haha
- rpmisms 5y agoJoel Salatin, holistic farmer. I think you'll like his work, he's an author and has been on Joe Rogan. Key to his credo is "Respecting the pigness of the pig, and the cowness of the cow". He's almost the precise opposite of a factory farmer.
- cogman10 5y agoI've worked with cows. They are certainly more intelligent than most pets (dogs/cats). They'll figure things out a lot faster and without specific training. For example, I knew one cow that learned how to open gates and doors with their tongue just by watching us open the doors/gates. Getting a pet to do those sorts of behaviors usually takes treats and a lot of time. Honestly, the only thing that surprises me about this is the fact that cows have bladder (and bowel?) control.
- mod 5y agoMy dogs tag-team my gate and its latch. It's a very simple latch, with a loop of wire that goes over the top of the fence post. One dog noses the wire up, while another dog pushes on the gate itself with her paw. I had to start latching it with a carabiner where the loop cannot come over the fence post. I don't know if they learned it from watching me, or by trial and error, but I certainly did not train them to do it.
- ghostbrainalpha 5y agoI'd love to see a video of them tag-teaming the problem like that. That's pretty amazing.
- screye 5y ago> more intelligent than most pets This was something I didn't believe until my mom and dad recalled what it was like growing up on small farms with a house cow in India. The they are incredibly intelligent and excellent judges of emotion. They are protective of their owners and can be trained quite well. This was their rational argument for asking me to not eat beef. I still eat beef, but I can imagine that it's quite distressing when a cow is no different than a pet dog to you. (religious reasons aside)
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y agoMost people that have had pigs as pets will also tell you that they are ridiculously smart - and in many ways similar to dogs.
- BigTex420 5y agoYou can potty train anything. I potty trained my hamster
- throwaway889900 5y agoI tried potty training my pet rock. Just never wants to go.
- noisy_boy 5y agoHave you tried putting it on a stool?
- carom 5y agoI'm a hobbyist dog trainer with my dogs and it's amazing how effective positive reinforcement is. These cows were trained to pee in a location with treat training, same goes for dogs. It's about telling them what you want them to do, reinforcing the behaviors you like and redirecting the ones you dislike. I'm not surprised at all that the cows are capable of this. The masterclass of clicker training seems to be chickens. [1] From what I've heard of it, they don't understand positive punishment, so you only have positive reinforcement, and they're kinda dense. Still, with treat training they can learn to do some impressive tricks. 1. https://www.clickertraining.com/node/1906 https://www.clickertraining.com/node/1906
- hinkley 5y agoI met someone who was a falconer, I suspect that's a general bird trait. Punishing them doesn't compute. They just think you're a jerk. Apparently with falcons and hawks in particular you can cause them to regress with certain missteps, and have to train them again. He had said something about going out of town and having to start over with some behavioral training they'd worked out before he left.
- wespiser_2018 5y agoWhat? Chickens understand Positive Punishment, same with Negative Reinforcement. If it has a brain and acts in the real world, learning theory applies, and these are the fundamental by which we learn from our interaction with the world. Not understanding that avoid something that hurts you is effectively death. The reason not to use averse training methods isn't effectiveness in training, punishment can teach a lot and chickens need to stay alive, it's the possible of generalization of negative experiences causes can cause unintended behavioral issues, and shaping would be a much different exercise. I hear this argument a lot of "positive only" trainers, that negative methods are somehow not effective, and it just cannot possibly be true!
- atatatat 5y agoChickens don't even understand when they're decapitated.
- voiper1 5y agoBut how does this help - they will have the same amount of flatulence, defecation, and urine. The issue is where it goes, and that before it went straight into the ground and now it can be collected and dealt with?
- rrobukef 5y agoDisease control, livable conditions, worker safety to name all I could think of.
- voiper1 5y agoSecond paragraph: ".... it could put a serious dent in the toxic chemicals and greenhouse gases produced by bovine waste." How would toilet training reduce greenhouse gases?
- apetresc 5y agoI'm guessing by having them poop somewhere not outdoors, where the methane can be contained somehow. (Not that that matters - the bulk of beef cattle can barely move, it's not like factory farms have space for designated potty areas or something).
- jandrese 5y agoOr just having them poop on a grate that goes down to a sewer system. Training beef cows seems like something of a waste of time since they get slaughtered so young. Milk cows however could be worthwhile.
- hinkley 5y agoWalking on grates wearing shoes is one thing. Walking on grates wearing hooves is something else entirely. Especially if you want to make the holes big enough for cow patties - which are high in fiber - to fall through. In fact there's a device for letting cars through but not cows that is basically a grate you put on the road. The fence comes up to the grate on both sides and there is no gate. You just drive over the grate.
- yboris 5y agoSubtitle is "Advance could help solve a messy environmental problem" You know what would solve the messy environmental problem? Reducing one's meat consumption. Once you wake up from the society-wide hallucination you begin to see how schizophrenic our world is with respect to animals. Things that are routinely allowed to happen in factory farms would land you in federal prison if you do it to a pet. Pets are considered belongings, so if you kill one, the owner isn't owed much beyond monetary damages. We rape cows, feed more than 60% of our pharmaceuticals to animals to keep them from dying. In a generation or two, children will look with disgust on the aging adults who routinely ignored the horrors of ongoing animal abuse (by consuming meat).
- sjwalter 5y agoYou're making "consuming meat" equivalent to "consuming factory farmed meat". I agree with you on the horrors of factory farms, but farms like mine (https://mulligan.farm https://mulligan.farm), wherein we raise our chickens on pasture, require vastly less pharmaceuticals (other than their Marek's disease leaky vaccine they get at birth, our chickens need no more antibiotics than simple sunlight and fresh air) than factory farmed meat. In the 50s, Americans on average spent ~20% of their budgets on food and 10% on healthcare. Today, it's about 18% on healthcare and 9% on food. If we swapped back to the model from the 50s, wherein our food was a bigger proportion of the budget and we were less fat and unhealthy as a result, we could easily have, say, 10,000 small farms supplying healthy, environmentally-sane, meat to local communities, rather than a concentrated agribusiness selling gross, tortured flesh to the entire country.
- namdnay 5y agoThat's a good first step, but I feel you're skipping over some of the issues here... At the end of the day, you're still raping and killing animals. I love meat, but I'm pretty sure my grandchildren (or maybe their grandchildren) will look back at us in the same way we look back at public executions
- sjwalter 5y ago
- devoutsalsa 5y agoThere's nothing more satisfying than target with a good bowel moo-vement.
- xyzzy21 5y agoYeah, invented by people who've never worked a day on a farm!
- mostsecurection 5y agoWhy is this on Hacker News?
- chickenpotpie 5y agoProbably going to get downvoted for this, things like this are why I’m shocked people think veganism is a crazy idea. It’s one thing for people to say it’s expensive or not practical, but I can’t understand how someone can see something like this and not agree there’s at least some merit to the idea.
- lr4444lr 5y agoAs a meat eater, I don't think there are too many serious challenges outside of religious beliefs to the ethical arguments for veganism. Mammals at least are clearly as sentient about survival and their kin as we are. But that doesn't mean we can't accept that their suffering is worth it for our gustatory pleasure. I could accept a world where I simply have to pay more for meat to spare the horrors of factory farming, but I have no personal problem with humane-intentioned husbandry and slaughter.
- adventured 5y agoI wouldn't downvote you for that opinion, however I am curious to hear your elaboration on what you mean. I'm not vegan and never will be. I don't think veganism is a crazy idea, I think it's great if that's what a person likes. And I don't see how this story, the context of it, adds substantial merit to veganism.
- 21eleven 5y ago> I don't see how this story, the context of it, adds substantial merit to veganism. If cows are smart enough to be potty trained then maybe we should not confine them to feedlots and slaughter them.
- mhh__ 5y agoI heard that cows can even build primitive tools
- h2odragon 5y ago'The Far Side" documented a bovine rocket program, iirc
- nathias 5y agoIt took me three comments to realize this isn't about crows.
- whoomp12342 5y agoso you can get them to poop in a bin for fertilizer now?
- tomohawk 5y agoFlying sheep https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrB_D_3IXOU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrB_D_3IXOU
- motohagiography 5y agoMisread headline as: Researchers successfully train potty cows. Rather a greater accomplishment I expected.
- anotherevan 5y agoI dunno, sounds like a load of bullshit. (boom-tish)
- rpmisms 5y agoNormally I'd downvote this, but I have a weakness for situationally aware puns. Kudos.
- peterburkimsher 5y agoThe article mentions ammonia, but what about methane? "Methane is the second-largest contributor to climate change and the majority of methane emissions caused by human activity comes from livestock." [1] How much methane is emitted by the act of farting, compared to the waste decomposing? I'm so glad that this research has succeeded, and here, because in a country like New Zealand there is political willpower (pro-environment) and industrial capacity (Fonterra dairy) to get this mooving. I wish I could give the researcher a pat on the back. [1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/03/feeding-cows-seaweed-can-fight-methane-climate-change/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/03/feeding-cows-seaweed-...
- tsjq 5y agothe seaweed research thing is going around for 5 years now, and there's nothing done on the ground yet .
- aaron695 5y agoThis is stupid along with most of these comments about commerical farms and whatever made up environmental effects the cult pushes this week. But for homesteading this can be fun and is talked about with most? livestock. What they hint at in this article is you can train for urination but not the pooping. But they often poop afterwards (but they also poop without urination) It's said the livestock can't control pooping but there are myths of people who teach them to poop in the correct spot. Not sure if it's legend or not.
- rpmisms 5y agoI'm a farm kid, my wife more so than I. Livestock are stupid: they embody the herd mentality. Individual animals are often very smart. The exceptions are sheep and any poultry. Sheep are the most blazingly stupid animals I've ever encountered, and I've watched a chicken and a turkey, respectively, run into a corner repeatedly because it didn't see the open field behind it, and literally stare upwards into rain until it inhaled water and drowned. Cows are quite smart, but also amazingly lazy. They will lie in one spot and starve to death, because they're too lazy to walk to food. However, start milking them, and you'll learn exactly how clever they are. They'll plot for weeks just to fuck with you or put a foot in the bucket. Horses are worse, because they can kill you easily, so you can't just punch them if they threaten you, like you can with cows. (Punching cows doesn't hurt them, just annoys them enough to leave you alone, sometimes). They're all clever, but nothing matches goats. Goats are horrifyingly smart, and very very mischievous. They'll plan escapes from any enclosure, will manipulate you by looking cute, and will specifically knock you into muddy patches and bleat in a manner suspiciously like laughter. Thankfully, my wife's family has Great Pyrenees, one of the best breeds of dog known to man (Seriously, give them a look if you have land and are looking for a dog. Smart, amazingly gentle, and will kill a bear [literally, I've seen it] to protect you, and they got the kids out of trouble if the animals got rowdy. tl;dr: farm animals are actually really smart, have personalities, and are absolutely wonderful to be around growing up. You learn important life lessons, and a good amount of common sense. Oh, and Donkeys are better than almost any guard dog. They'll kick the shit out of anything that looks mean, and they can bite the head off a cougar, and will. It's nuts.
- praptak 5y agoDo not be so quick to dismiss poultry. There are quite a few articles about chickens' intelligence, say this one from Scientific American (sorry, paywalled): https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-startling-intelligence-of-the-common-chicken1/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-startling-int...
- rpmisms 5y agoYeah, they have good pattern recognition. They're just dazzlingly unintuitive.
- tommymachine 5y agoWhy aren’t they researching bat corona viruses, or solving global warming? We are all going to die. Wear your mask. Praise Fauci!
- lostlogin 5y agoHaving spent a happy half hour with my daughter cackling away at the Ig Nobel awards that were listed here recently, this gives equal enjoyment.
- iambozdar 5y agoGood cows...