Scientists train cows to "go to the toilet"

It turns out that cows can be as easy to potty training as toddlers.

The scientists tested the task: 11 of the 16 cows learned to use "MooLoo" (a cow enclosure toilet dedicated to experiments) when they had "urination."

Just like human parents, researchers used sweets to lure cows through gates and urinate in special enclosures. It took only 15 days to train these calves. And some human children take longer.

"Cows learn as fast as children at least 2 to 4 years old," said Lindsay Matthews, a senior author of the study and an animal behavior scientist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. He and his colleagues try to train calves at an indoor animal research laboratory in Germany.

Matthews said the sheer volume of urine waste is a serious environmental problem.

Urine contains nitrogen, which turns into ammonia when mixed with feces, which brings acid rain and other environmental problems. The nitrates in it contaminate the water and produce the air pollutant nitrous oxide. And cows can urinate a lot. A cow can produce about 30 liters of urine per day.

Donald Bloom, a professor of animal welfare at the University of Cambridge in the UNITED Kingdom, said that if it can be done, toilet-training animals can more easily manage waste and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Matthews said cows do like to eat sweets. When they had to urinate, 11 of the cows were squeezed into the fence to "go to the toilet" and were rewarded with their sweet rewards.

Currently, scientists only train cows to use MooLoo to urinate, not defecation. But Matthews predicts they can also train cows to somewhere specialized.

However, the biggest environmental problem facing livestock is the endorhemic gas methane they emit during hiccups and flatulence, an important source of global warming. Unable to train cows not to burp or fart, Matthews said, "they will explode." ”

Kevin

Source: Xinmin Evening News