COWS GET FRUSTRATED TOO!

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 489, 5 November 1948, Page 6

COWS GET FRUSTRATED TOO!

American Scientist Discusses the Social Problems of Dairy Herds

HE proportion of New Zealanders for whom cows are a matter of intense personal preoccupation is probably higher than that for any other people in the world-with the possible exception of the Danes. The latest official year book reveals that there are about. one and three-quarter million dairy .cows in milk in New Zealand, or putting it another way, a milking cow to every man, woman and child in the country. Thousands of men (and women and children too) have a more lengthy and intimate contact with cows (by spending some’six hours a day milking them, apd a few more feeding them and generally shifting them around the farm) than most other people have with the objects of their trades, professions, or callings. A dairy herd may average anything from 30 to 100 cows or more, and the men who milk these herds soon get to know the physical peculiarities of each cow-member of them. In most cases each cow has a name (although it won’t always answer to it), and to the accustomed eye, is easily distinguishable from its neighbours. But cows also have their psychological differences. As Professor W. E. Petersen, of Minnesota, the world-renowned authority on milking technique, milk secretion, and dairy-cow psychology who is at present in New Zealand on a lecture tour, said in a recent broadcast, "The cow is a most interesting animal as an individual. But I think farmers and people in general have not recognised the cow as an individual, or understood how she behaves. We know that she is the most economical animal in the world, in converting foodstuffs that cannot be used by human beings into the most valuakis food products. But that isn’t all..."

Although Professor Petersen went on to talk on that occasion about milking techniques, The Listener decided to interview him last week on the question of the tow as an individual and how she behaves, e A big, bluff, genial man who smokes a pipe with a half-ounce bowl, the Professor at first pooh-poohed the idea that he was really a specialist in bovine psychology. It was not his special line, he said. For one thing, he had not put in a sufficient amount of research on it. But he was interested in the behaviour of cows as it affected milking techniques, and he had ‘studied cow psychology from the psycho-somatic point of view-that is (as he put it) the consideration of "psychic effects upon the somatic or control system of the cow and its udder." He also had a few observations to make on the general behaviour of cows. People who were not dairy farmers might not know, he said, that the cows in a dairy herd arrange themselves in a definite social order. First there is the queen cow-a sort of supreme commander. She is the one who is always out in front when the herd is ambling towards the shed at milking time; she is the one who always goes first into the bails, is first to be milked, and is first to get out to that delectable hay , laid out in the adjoining night paddock. And after the queen comes the number two cow; and after her number three; and so on down the social scale to the lowliest cow in the herd, number 35 or 99 or whatever her number is, This poor cow is the sorrowing victim, often literally the butt, of all the other cows in the herd. She stands around disconsolately at milking time, waiting patiently for her turn, butted by the others, pushed against the rails, kicked into a corner, prodded by the horns of every Daisy or Strawberry who wants to work off a a a | ees

Once this social hierarchy is established, it becomes very difficult to break. The cows should get accustomed to their lot. But-and it’s an important but-cows, being feminine, are also social climbers. They want to improve their position on the social register, and continually feel they have to "keep ur with the Joneses." Unfortunately social aspirations are often frustrated, and in many cases cows in the middle of the social order will become psychological maladjusted and neurotic. They will develop frustration complexes just as humans do, simply because they have hopes of. belonging to a higher social order but haven’t got what it takes to get them there. How do frustrated cows behave? Like humans, they become dif‘ficult subjects to man-

age, Professor Petersen said. They become more excitable than their fellows, and stir up trouble in the herd. They become refractory at milking time. "IT have seen a new cow-one with presumably a fairly good social standing in her previous environment-come into a herd, start physical combats with her new companions, find she can only get up a certain number of rungs in the social ladder, and suddenly go all to pieces and become impossible _ to handle."

Then a dairy farmer also has to consider the problem of adjustment to the human element. Cows may be well adjusted to their own social order, but badly adjusted to humans because of maltreatment. Hence we get claims made by some farmers-in Scotland, for instance-that certain people can get better results with cows than others. Professor Petersen said he had with him a film that traced the history of one particular cow from which a certain man (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) could get 61 per cent. more milk in 305 days of machine-milking than anyone else could. The cow’s career had been followed for six years. If Mr. Smith, her special milker, was taken away, her milk yield would drop right away. As soon as he came back, it shot up again. Yet the man and the cow had no apparent system of communication. He didn’t whisper in her ear or scratch her neck before he started milking. It was just that they were well adjusted to each other, and a definite relationship had been set up between them, much as between’ a man and his horse or his dog. Psychological Types Cows al8o varied from type to type, and from breed to breed. Although he couldn’t say too much about the psychological characteristics ,of the various types without stepping on the toes of the breeders, he could say that a Jersey, for instance, was more sensitive to her environment than a Friesian. She might be more skittish and troublesome when socially maladjusted, but on the other hand she would respond bet-

— ter with good treatment. She would also become better adjusted to humans than other types, and could be more easily made into a pet. On the question of music in the cow-_ shed and whether it increased the milkflow, Professor Petersen said he had no detailed knowledge of its psychological value. He didn’t know whether the cows liked it or not, bu: he thought they were probably less likely to notice other distractions with the radio going. However, it was "quite the rule" in America for farmers to have radios going in their milking sheds. In more serious vein the Professor commented on dairying conditions in America. In the "milk sheds" (the term used to describe areas supplying milk to big cities like New York) the maintenance of herds was a real’ problem. Farmers in these districts wouldn’t rear heifers at all, but bought cows already in milk (generally about five years old), milked them as long as they were profitable (about 16 months on an average), and then sold them to the slaughterhouses. There was a tendency for the number of dairy herds to decrease these

days, although the demand for dairy products was greater than the supply. Labour difficulties were the main problem. As a result the number of dairy farmers was going down at an alarming rate. Some "just quit," others put in new labour-saving devices, such as an elevated milking platform to save the milker the labour of bending down to put the cups on. This latter innovation was proving most popular, the ideal height for such platforms being about 18 inches from the ground: Mastitis-No. 1 Disease Mastitis, or mammitis, he said, was officially listed in the United States as Number One disease, economically, to the dairy farmer. ~The standard treatment was penicillin, with which a fair degree of success had ‘been obtained, although it was not the solution by any means, and they were not quite so enthusiastic about it as they had been at first. Personally he thought the real solution was by prevention of the disease through proper management. "I’m going to. show a motion picture which describes how improper milking can injure the udder. The fundamental principle is to get all the milk out of

-- — --- the udder, and that’s the form of management we recommend. We don’t say ‘don’t strip. We say every bit of milk that’s let down can be obtained by proper manipulation of the cups, so that you don’t have to strip by hand. By pulling down on the cups and manipulating the udder with the other hand all the milk can be got out." In the States, he said, the Federal Department of Agriculture was doing a lot of big-scale experimental work, and co-operating with the individual states on disease control and meat inspection. But one thing the New Zealand dairy farmer didn’t seem to realise was that he had economic advantages greater than any other farmer in the world. In no other country could the cows be put out to pasture and get the greater part of their required milk-producing nutriment simply by eating the grass. In the United States 65 per cent. of the cow’s feed had to be harvested, stored, and refed to her. For that reason the farmer was engaged from early spring to late autumn on getting ia winter feed, and that was one reason why the average herd on a one-man dairy farm in America was considerably smaller than its New Zealand counterpart.