Do Cows think Grass tastes Good
Transcriber: Nhien Nguyen
Reviewer: Hani Eldalees
People manage their midlife
crises in their own way.
And for me, this involved a change
in career direction from being
a country vet here in Warrnambool,
where I spent most of my time driving
around dairy farms to taking up
an academic position at the
University of Melbourne.
Where I’m now an associate professor
in cattle medicine with
a Ph.D. in animal welfare.
Specifically, in my research,
I looked at the animal welfare
implications as dairy herds get bigger.
And over the years, I’ve spent a lot
of time watching cows eat grass.
You may be wondering about my title
to cows think grass tastes good.
Because at first glance, this seems like
a really simple question with perhaps
a fairly straightforward answer. But
it belies a deeper question.
What do cows want in life if they
think grass tastes good?
What else do they like and
what do they dislike?
So and how can we give them a life
worth living as a vet coming from
a farming background, I’ve
always been interested in
the relationship that we have with
the animals in our custody.
How do we reconcile the fact that
we want to be good to them
and we want to look after them
and we want them to be happy?
With the fact that we also eat them.
As an animal welfare scientist,
I’m interested in what we need
to do to give our cows
the best life that it’s possible
for them to have.
Behavior is a product of evolution.
There are things that are instincts
that we all need to do,
we have behaviors that we are
motivated to express.
And so I’m interested in looking at what
those things are about cows that they
want to do, what do they like, how
can we give them what they want?
Humans often make sacrifices to achieve
outcomes that make them feel good.
Anyone who plays sport, works,
studies or saves up for a trip for a
holiday to a place like Warrnambool.
Well, understand this. The interesting
thing is that in
the sphere of human world,
the magnitude of the sacrifice that
is made is often proportional to
the respect that humans get or
the reward that they get.
We think it’s fantastic when
humans make big sacrifices.
But in the animal welfare space,
this is not the case,
we were aiming to minimize the sacrifices
that animals must make.
So whilst it might seem obvious to anyone
who has watched cows graze that they
like the taste of grass. It’s important
that we also look at
the sacrifices that they make in order to
do so and whether they’re worth it.
So today, I’m going to talk
about animal welfare.
We know that animal welfare is
important to most people.
Can you put your hand up if animal
welfare is important to you?
Now, who was game not to put
their hand up and living in
a place like Warrnambool where we are,
where more than half of our
households own a pet.
We’ve got a thriving racing industry
and we’re surrounded by
a big farming community. Animal
welfare is very important,
but what is animal welfare
and how do we measure it?
There’s two concepts that I’d
like to talk about today.
Animal welfare and animal ethics. OK,
let’s start with animal welfare.
The reason that we worry about animal
welfare in the first place is
because we want animals to be happy.
The reason we worry about animal
welfare in the first place is
because we want animals to be happy.
And that’s an important thing.
Animal welfare is about
how the animal feels.
And it’s a science, it’s about how the
animal perceives its own condition,
good animal welfare,
how do we measure it?
Because we can look at cows at one point
in time and see whether they seem happy
or not. But what animal welfare
scientists do is to add up
the sum of life experiences.
And see whether or not animals have had a
life worth living overall and there’s
a scale at one end, we can have a
good life, a life worth living.
Or we could have a point of balance.
Or we could have a life not worth living.
Or indeed, we could have
a life worth avoiding.
So animal welfare science is all about
measuring things about animals,
understanding how the
animal feels and how
the animal perceives its own condition,
and it’s a science.
This is different from animal ethics,
which is how humans feel about what
we do to and with animals.
Animal ethics is our beliefs,
and they’re based on our life experience
and our cultural norms.
Some people think it’s OK to eat horses.
Or dogs. Or Whales.
Some people think it’s not OK
to eat any of those things,
and indeed some people think it’s not OK
to eat cows in places they’re sacred
or pigs or indeed, for some people,
it’s not okay to eat the products
of any living being.
It’s interesting, the classical view of
the animal welfare scientist is that
we don’t really give much thought
as to why an animal is where it is. It’s
all about how the animal feels.
So as an example, a dog being
bred for food in Vietnam has
the same animal welfare requirements
as a pet dog in Warrnambool.
What they need is a good life
and a humane death,
whether or not we should be breeding dogs
for food is an ethical issue.
Now ethical or cultural beliefs
are just their opinions,
albeit that they’re often
very strongly held.
And in a civilized society,
we require a certain tolerance towards
people who believe things differently
than us. This is very obviously seen in
the area of religion, for example,
I think society is getting much better at
letting people worship
whoever they wish to.
And I think we’re reasonably
good at in the sporting sphere,
we’re quite happy to barrack
for opposing teams,
even though none of us has any
logical basis for doing so.
It’s interesting to me, though, that
when it comes to food choice,
there seems to be this thing
where it’s like a religion,
everybody wants to convince others
to their way of thinking.
And I wish that were not the case.
I think we would be better off if we were
able to respect each other’s beliefs.
So animal welfare, science about
how the animal feels,
animal ethics about how we feel.
Both of these are important.
Let’s talk about animal welfare.
Arguments in the animal welfare space
often center around
the extent to which we should
avoid suffering, and indeed,
most of the cruelty laws in Australian
states are about exactly that,
the prevention of unnecessary suffering.
There’s an important word there,
unnecessary.
Because in life, some suffering
is necessary.
When I look at my own life, I have moments
I’ve had moments of great anguish.
I’ve had moments of terrible sadness.
I’ve had moments of extreme pain.
And suffering, but I’ve also had moments
of great joy and pleasure and happiness,
and just for the record, I do think that
my life thus far has been very well
worth living.
So a good life, a life worth living will
likely include some terrible moments.
In some respects, I think that
the farm animals in our care are
often luckier than wild animals
and indeed humans when it comes to having
humane death because we have euthanasia.
Look at nature, there are not many ducks
that die in their nest surrounded by
their loving family. Animals in nature die
of starvation, predation, disease,
injury, or some horrible combination
of those things,
and if they were in our care, we would
not consider it to be humane.
But of course, animal welfare is much more
than avoiding suffering
if we want animals to have a good life.
We need to understand what it
is they want from life.
We all know how to make a dog happy.
Don’t we, give it a pat.
I know how to make my cat happy
ignore it.
Humans know how to make
each other very happy,
but I don’t think we’ll go down that path.
But how would you make a cow happy?
How would you take your favorite cow
and give it a moment of pleasure?
What I’d like to do is just to look at
some of the behaviors that cows have
and that they wish to express and see
whether or not we’re able to provide that
for them.
There are some aspects of cow behavior
that I really relate to,
cows like to spend most of the day eating,
but there are three instincts
that they have
which are very well ingrained.
The first is that they are herd animal.
Now, instincts and the need to express
behavior are evolutionary things,
humans have been around
2 or 3,00,000 years,
but herd behavior in our ancestral animals
has likely been around 200 million years.
And you can see
why it evolved, can’t you?
that there’s safety in numbers.
Cows like to be in a herd,
they get comfort from belonging
to have a herd and having
an important place within it.
There’s great mental anguish when
a cow is separated from the herd
and farmers in the room
will understand that
a cow that’s off by itself
will behave irrationally,
run through fences,
run through people
completely irrationally.
Similarly, humans disconnected from the
herd suffered great mental anguish.
People have been known to kill themselves
as a result of being disconnected
from the herd.
And the desire to
have herd approval is
so strong that it can override
our good judgment and reason.
And some of the terrible things that have
happened in the world
have happened
because of a desire for herd approval.
Interestingly, there’s two types of
animals in the world as
prey animals and hunter animals
and cows are prey animals,
they tend to form big groups
for protection.
Humans are hunter animals.
They tend to form tribes which
often fight each other.
One of the things I really like about cows
is that they don’t fight each other
or become aggressive just because a
cow comes from a different herd
or looks different.
The second instinct that’s important
is agency.
Animal welfare scientists give
the name agency to what we would
probably call freedom,
the ability to choose what you are doing
to have some control over your own life.
And whilst cows in a paddock, I think,
do get some agency in that they’re able
to choose when they sit and stand
and who they walk around with
and who they interact with
and when they’re going to eat
and those sorts of things.
But true agency, the ability to decide who
they’re going to have children with,
that’s a sacrifice that they do make.
But they make that sacrifice in return
for being fed well, looked after,
and provided with a humane death.
And I actually think that sacrifice is
probably one that’s well worth making.
They don’t get agency, for example, when
they come in to be milked twice a day.
In those times, but the third thing is
that cows like us are creatures of habit,
they love a routine, and once they
get used to the milking routine,
one of the ways that we can provide good
welfare for them is to provide a nice,
consistent routine. I think we see
it in people, too, don’t we?
Resistance to change is a
reasonably common thing.
I think it was Betty Friedan
who when someone said,
you can’t have everything you want.
He replied, Well, actually, you
can have everything you want,
you just can’t have it
all at the same time.
So in some senses, cows are able to
express some of their normal behaviors,
but animal welfare science is
not just about suffering,
and it’s not just about being able
to have some naturalness.
It’s also about having a humane death,
a good life and a humane death.
How do we reconcile the idea that we
provide animals with good animal welfare,
but we also kill them and eat them?
This is interesting because from an animal
welfare science point of view,
a humane death with unnecessary
suffering is a good thing.
And from an animal welfare science point
of view, the timing of death,
is not an animal welfare issue, if the
abattoir rings up and says, I’m sorry,
we can’t take your cattle this week like
we planned, it’ll have to be next week.
There’s no great celebration about
the amazing animal welfare
outcome that has come as
a result of those cows living
another seven days.
The timing of death is not an animal
welfare issue. It’s the nature of it.
Whether or not the death should
happen is an ethical issue.
Now, from my own point of view, I’m
reasonably comfortable with that,
I think I might feel different
if I thought that
cows had an expectation of the future
but I don’t think they spend
their day looking forward to
the day when their granddaughter joins the
herd or indeed worrying about what
the future holds for her.
Cows
Remember the past, but they
live in the present and
I think many of us humans will be happier
if we did a bit more of that as well.
People anthropomorphize death
more than anything,
it’s been a theme of poets
through the ages
that our need
to prevent suffering
and death in others may well come
from a fear of our own death.
Killing an animal is so close and so real,
so some people live their lives through a
philosophy
of causing as little death as possible.
And some people, for example,
choose to have margarine over butter
for what they consider to be ethical
reasons or almond milk.
But it’s more complicated than
most people think because
the ethics are not always clear.
If you grab a canola crop.
And use insecticide to kill the insects.
Are you morally responsible for the
birds and animals that starve
as a result of that?
The beautiful yellow
flowers that give us good feelings about
a canola crop are present for one month
of the year
and then absent for 11 months of the year,
and there are huge tracts of land without
a single flower.
So the bees die.
And then the stubble is burnt
and everything that could live there
is killed.
How is that human?
Take an almond crop and almond trees,
magpies cannot nest in almond trees.
If you grow an orchard
of almond trees with
a bird’s cannot nest and use water in such
a way that wildlife cannot share it.
Have you been good for the world?
So how do we produce food ethically?
I don’t know, I’m an animal
welfare scientist,
(Laughing)
So the cows like the taste of grass.
Yes, they do, and I’m glad they
get the chance to eat it.
I think that our farmers should celebrate
the animal welfare outcomes and
the biodiversity that can come
from pasture based farming.
I love that our farms can co-exist
with birds and snakes and trees
and all manner of wildlife,
albeit at lower levels,
than they would be if there were no farms.
And I’m content with the
effects of farming,
where cows can choose to walk
or sit for most of the day,
where they can be members of
a herd and they can feel
the satisfaction of social interaction.
Where they can experience
moments of pleasure,
albeit that they may well also be
moments of pain and suffering.
And where they can experience contentment,
even if it’s not 100 percent of the time.
Where they can have a life worth living.
And whilst I respect their
right to hold them,
I disagree with the people who hold the
view that we should not farm animals,
particularly those that hold the view
that because we have to kill them,
we should not have had them
in the first place.
I worry that this philosophy
is misguided because death
and suffering still happen
with food crops
and with plant based fiber,
but they’re just one step
further out of sight.
I think the world would be
a better place if we all spent our
time trying to maximize happiness
and minimize suffering. And we didn’t
try simply to avoid death.
And in my world, this includes letting
cows enjoy the taste of grass.
Thank you.
(Clapping)