To This Neuroscientist, Cows Are Like Puppies

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: This is Science Friday. I’m Sophie Bushwick. If you’ve ever seen a cute cow video on social media, you might notice they seem to have a lot in common with dogs. They can wag their tails. They love to gobble down some tasty treats. And if you’re lucky, they can flop over for a nice belly or neck scratch.

They’re clearly curious animals. But how smart are they exactly? That’s the question that neuroscientist and author Dr. Gregory Berns had when he and his wife moved from Atlanta to the Georgia countryside in 2020 and started raising cows of their own. To better understand them, he applied his years of experience researching the brains of animals like dogs and dolphins.

He joins us now to talk about his new book. It’s called Cowpuppy– An Unexpected Friendship and a Scientist’s Journey into the Secret World of Cows. Dr. Berns, welcome back to Science Friday.

GREGORY BERNS: Hey, Sophie, great to be here.

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: So I love the title of the book, Cowpuppy. Can you tell us the story behind that word and how you got started raising cows?

GREGORY BERNS: Yeah. I’m fond of the title, too. So I ended up on this farm back in 2020 and without kind of a clear idea of exactly what I was going to do, other than I had this vague notion that I was going to grow vegetables and live sustainably. And of course, I would have to have animals because being a dog person in general, animal person. What’s a farm without animals?

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: Right.

GREGORY BERNS: And I didn’t know exactly what I was going to get and, pretty soon, found myself with a bull and two cows, which I got primarily just to manage the grass because we had all these pastures. And the idea kind of morphed into this, well, the cows will eat the grass. I’ll collect their manure. We’ll compost it. Then we’ll turn it into the food garden.

Then we’ll grow all these great fruits and vegetables. And we’ll eat some. We’ll sell some at the farmer’s market. And it would it would just be wonderful.

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: So they would contribute to having a sustainable farm?

GREGORY BERNS: That’s right. So my original idea was just to kind of use them as biological reactors.

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: [LAUGHS]

GREGORY BERNS: Not as food products themselves, but just to help with the farm management or partners in the enterprise, shall we say?

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: Got it.

GREGORY BERNS: And so I can’t kind of overemphasize how little I knew about cows, which was probably about the same as what most people knew, which is you see them from the side of the road and they seem kind of almost inert and sedate and pretty easygoing, at least until you get up close to them and you realize how big most of them are.

But that aside, the cows turned out to be pregnant. And the person I got them from dropped them off and informed me that I would have a surprise very soon.

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: [LAUGHS]

GREGORY BERNS: Which was, in fact, about two weeks after I got them when our first calf was born. So talk about rapid learning curve. Then that kind of–

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: Sure.

GREGORY BERNS: –throws you into it. And then the other one calved about two weeks later. And once that happened, I kind of fell in love with them. Just, I mean– partially just from watching them, how they behaved with each other, just watching how the mamas tended to their babies and how the babies latched on and bonded so quickly and how fast they grew up and, frankly, how playful these calves were.

And so one in particular turned out to be very playful and very affectionate and kind of very outgoing, both with the other cows, but also with me. And so I kind of jokingly said he’s– he behaves like a puppy. So I started calling him my cowpuppy.

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: [LAUGHS] And a lot of your past research involved studying animal brains and asking questions like, do dogs feel emotions the same way as we do? What level of intelligence do they have? As a researcher, what were your initial big questions when you started living with cows?

GREGORY BERNS: Well, I hadn’t had kind of too much thought or experience into what cows might experience. I mean, we have an advantage with dogs in the sense that, one, they’ve evolved with us for a long period of time. But also, many people have firsthand experience where dogs share our lives. They sleep at our feet, or sometimes they sleep in our beds.

And so we kind of come to understand their body language and how they behave. And we recognize their emotions. And much of my previous work was kind of studying the neural basis of some of those feelings that they had.

And so I didn’t really know what to expect with cows, because I hadn’t had any firsthand experience. And yet the more I observed them, the more similar I saw them to be to dogs in many ways. They– it became very clear that they– that, first off, they have a capacity for emotion. And in fact, in many ways they’re more demonstrative than dogs are in how they show affection both with each other and with me.

And in the difference with the cows is that any relationship that I formed with them was kind of much more hard-earned than with dogs, because I say that dogs are easy. And they kind of come out ready to be everyone’s friends. But cows, of course, come from a very different evolutionary trajectory, where they evolved from animals that were preyed upon and have kind of this natural wariness of anything that comes into their environment. And so when they accept you into their group, it’s really special. And they’re, frankly, very loyal once they do.

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: And you found early in your cow journey that there’s not a lot of existing research on cow intelligence or social behavior. What do you make of that?

GREGORY BERNS: There’s been a fair amount of research around cattle, both beef cattle and dairy cattle. But the vast majority of it is from a production standpoint. So researchers have looked at things that produce more milk or put on more weight for cows.

And so it’s kind of all been geared towards that. And there just hasn’t been the amount of attention given to what we now do with dogs, especially, and trying to really understand what their cognition is like. How do cows think? And what is their emotional capacity? And how do they represent these feelings that they have.

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: And if that was studied more, do you think it would be helpful for understanding animal intelligence more broadly?

GREGORY BERNS: I think every species we look at, we have to kind of take on its own, if you will. So I think this has been kind of a flaw in a lot of animal research in the past, mainly kind of coming from the top down, where we always tend to resort to human metrics of intelligence. And this, of course, is problematic when you’re studying other species because until we start probing it, who’s to say what it means to be an intelligent cow or a not-so-intelligent cow? And why should it even be surprising that you might have some that are smarter than each other? So we have to map these things out.

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: What surprising things did you learn about cows’ brains? And how do they compare to human brains?

GREGORY BERNS: Well, so if you look at a cow’s brain– and I have, using MRI– probably the most surprising thing about it is how folded it is or what we call gyrification. And so we know, with human brains, they’re very folded, and everyone has seen pictures of that. A dog brain, in comparison, is not nearly as folded.

And yet the cow, which most people would not consider as intelligent as a dog, even though I think that’s a silly comparison, and yet the cow has kind of this more folded, more gyrified cortex. Now, what that means is a matter of debate. Some people, for decades, have been saying that the more folded a brain is, the more tissue is in there and the more capacity for different types of intellectual and cognitive function there is. That may be. I have found them to be more intelligent than dogs in many ways.

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: Yeah, can you get into– in what ways were they more intelligent?

GREGORY BERNS: So I think the most dramatic demonstration of intelligence that I had is with something called the mirror test. So the mirror test is perhaps one of the most famous tests of, supposedly, self-awareness in the animal world. And the idea is you put a mirror in front of a person or an animal or an infant, and do they recognize their reflection as themselves?

This is a huge deal in science. Perhaps with the exception of humans, perhaps only chimpanzees and maybe dolphins have demonstrated that they understand that the reflection is them. A dog, for example, typically either ignores their reflection or barks at it.

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: [LAUGHS]

GREGORY BERNS: They show no recognition or even, frankly, how to use a mirror. We take this for granted. You look at a mirror, you know that the things in the mirror are reflections and represent things behind you, not necessarily on the other side of the mirror.

So what I did– and nobody had done this before– was I put up a giant mirror in my pasture. I lashed it to the fence. And I just left it there for months because you have to give animals enough time to explore and learn at their own pace.

And initially, the cows were just– they were entranced by it. They would spend many hours just staring at the reflections. And sometimes they would look behind it to try to figure it out. And then what was amazing, over time, several of them seemed to figure out how to use the mirror in a very functional way. When some other cow came up behind them while they were looking in the mirror, and they saw that reflection, they understood to turn around and look behind them.

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: Wow.

GREGORY BERNS: Which, to me, is quite remarkable because I’ve never seen a dog do that.

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: And something else that I learned from your book is how cows use licking as a social behavior. Can you explain why licking is so important to them?

GREGORY BERNS: Yeah. So this is not uncommon in the animal world. I mean, dogs lick, cats lick. But why they do it is a matter of debate. Some people say they do it to groom each other and get off parasites.

But what cows do is they use it as a form of affection and social bonding. And so it’s actually very interesting and very stereotypical. When a cow wants to be licked, they will kind of sidle up to another one. They’ll put their head down a little bit, and then they’ll waggle it from side to side, essentially saying, please lick me.

And then the other one will start licking their neck. And then the first one might stretch out their head a little bit. And it actually mimics a position that calves do when they’re nursing the udder from below. And it’s what we call a neotenous behavior, which is a juvenile behavior that gets retained into adulthood, which turns out to be very common in animals as ways to show affection.

And I think the way to think about it is these are what some people have called soothing signals. They’re a way that the animals calm themselves and reinforce their bonds with each other. And they’ll do it to me too.

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: Huh. I’d also like to look at the downside of cattle. We know that cows produce a lot of the greenhouse gas methane through their burps and farts. And they also require a lot of resources. So a big chunk of agriculture and land in the US is dedicated exclusively to growing grain and corn for cows to consume.

You’ve spent a lot of time with cattle ranchers over the past few years. What do you think are some ways that this system could be set up differently to reduce our environmental and ethical concerns?

GREGORY BERNS: Yeah, it’s– I mean, it’s a difficult problem because especially in the United States, our agricultural system, especially when it comes to meat, is very centralized. So most people raising cattle tend to raise it on their farmland. And then when the animal gets to a certain weight, they sell it at auction and then the animal gets shipped usually to the Midwest, where they’re so-called finished on industrialized farms.

So part of the environmental impact is the original land that they’re grazing, but also the environmental impact of those large factory farms where they’re finished in the last couple of weeks of their life, where they’re fed large amounts of grain. Now, cows can eat grain, although that is not what they evolved to eat. They are ruminants, meaning they are evolved to eat grass, and they have very unique digestive systems that are well suited to that.

And so when it comes to the methane emissions, for example, it’s definitely a case of what goes in comes out. And so when you pump in a lot of these high-value carbohydrates, the fermentation that happens in the process of the cow, that’s what generates the methane. And so one way to mitigate that is stop feeding them grain. So I mean, apart from changing the feed, I mean, all of this is driven by people’s dietary habits. And so– so then, of course, probably the biggest thing that people can do is cut down on their consumption of meat.

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: And something you write about, as well, is the way that these cows seem to have an almost therapeutic effect when you spend extended amounts of time with them. What did you learn about that and the effect it also had on your neighbors?

GREGORY BERNS: That’s right. So as I said, I mean, my cows are here to help me manage the pasture. That was their original purpose. But as I fell in love with them, and they fell in love with me, I found them to be very relaxing and grounding in a way that I hadn’t found any other animal.

And so what I started doing as kind of a daily routine is I would just sit down with them. When they were lying down in the pasture, chewing their cud, eventually, I was able just to sit with them and rest with them, lean against them and just, essentially, meditate. And it was incredibly peaceful.

And my neighbor, who has lived in the area for decades and had grown up with cattle, saw me doing this. He saw me doing it with the bull, who has horns. And so the bull, whose name is Ricky Bobby, would just kind of– he would roll over on his side and put his head in my lap, and he’d let me scratch his belly.

And my neighbor was just dumbfounded by this. He said, I’ve never seen anything like this. So he started coming over. And then he invited his friends to come over and see it. And so kind of pretty soon, we were holding cow therapy sessions.

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: [LAUGHS] That’s amazing. And because– just because you mentioned Ricky Bobby specifically, can you talk about how Ricky Bobby’s personality influenced his name?

GREGORY BERNS: [LAUGHS] Yeah, so the original three– so he was the bull, and then the two cows, and so we named the two females Lucy and Ethel from the old TV show I Love Lucy. And so Ricky Bobby was then Ricky, so for Ricky Ricardo.

But he turned out to have this very goofy personality, where you bring out the food can, and you shake a little bit of food. And he was like right at the front of the line sticking his tongue out. And so it reminded me more of the character Ricky Bobby from Talladega Nights.

Ricky Bobby has several great quotes, but probably the one that’s most relevant is, if you ain’t first, you’re last. For Ricky Bobby, the human, that was the finish line in a NASCAR race. But for Ricky Bobby the cow, it was first in line at the feed trough.

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: [LAUGHS] Yes. And at this point, you’ve lived with these cows for about four years now. What surprised you about them over the years? And do you see them differently than before?

GREGORY BERNS: They surprise me every day. They show a level of social bonding that I haven’t seen with my dogs. We have anywhere from three to five dogs at any given time. And although the dogs coexist with each other, generally peacefully, I would not ever have considered them good friends. They just kind of want parental attention most of the time.

And the cows genuinely seem to care for each other. I see them groom each other and how they are so bonded as a unit. Sometimes, when we have to do things to take care of them, like trimming hooves, or we have to give them vaccinations, and we have to take one out of the herd momentarily, that isolation is like the worst thing for them. More than any physical discomfort that they have, they cannot stand being separated from each other. And it’s a testament to how social they are, but it’s also kind of very touching.

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: Mhm. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk about this. And good luck with your farm.

GREGORY BERNS: Oh, thank you. And thank you for having me on the show again.

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: Dr. Gregory Berns, professor at Emory University. And you can read an excerpt of his book at sciencefriday.com/cowpuppy.

Copyright © 2024 Science Friday Initiative. All rights reserved. Science Friday transcripts are produced on a tight deadline by 3Play Media. Fidelity to the original aired/published audio or video file might vary, and text might be updated or amended in the future. For the authoritative record of Science Friday’s programming, please visit the original aired/published recording. For terms of use and more information, visit our policies pages at http://www.sciencefriday.com/about/policies/