In an era where researchers are showing that our canine pals may be able to intuit our thoughts, farmed animals remain a black box. There are only about a half-dozen labs researching farm animals cognition worldwide, and no conferences dedicated exclusively to the topic. Many researchers do not want to know if the animals they think of as dinner turn out to have rich inner lives. They don’t see the point, they say: Why waste your time if it’s not going to improve milk or meat production? They would prefer to keep them dumb.
DAVID GRIMM: Over the past decade, researchers at The Research Institute for Farm Animal Biology (FBN), one of the world’s leading centers for investigating the minds of goats, pigs, and other ‘livestock’, have shown that pigs show signs of empathy, goats rival dogs in some tests of social intelligence, and, in one of the field’s splashiest recent finds, cows can be potty trained, suggesting a self-awareness behind the blank stares and cud chewing that has shocked even some experts…
‘Livestock’ are dumb and unworthy of scientific attention. Over the past decade, researchers at FBN and elsewhere have shown that pigs show signs of empathy, goats rival dogs in some tests of social intelligence, and, in one of the field’s, um, splashiest recent finds, cows can be potty trained, suggesting a self-awareness behind the blank stares and cud chewing that has shocked even some experts.
“There’s a lot to be learned by studying the mental lives of these creatures,” says Christopher Krupenye, a Johns Hopkins University psychologist who explores cognition in humans and more traditional animal models such as chimpanzees and dogs. Ignoring ‘livestock’, he says, has been a “missed opportunity” by the scientific community.
The field faces challenges, however, and not just because of rambunctious goats. Farm animals can be huge, many are hard to train, and traditional funders and high-profile journals have generally spurned such studies. But as scientists push past these obstacles, they are gaining insights not only into the minds of ‘livestock’, but into the evolution of our own cognition as well. What they learn could even change the way we house and treat these creatures…
A couple of decades ago, work like this would have been laughed out of the barn. There are an estimated 78 billion farm animals on Earth—a number that dwarfs monkeys, rodents, and humans combined—and we have lived with them longer than any other creature save dogs. Yet in an era where researchers are modeling rat brains on computers and showing that our canine pals may be able to intuit our thoughts, ‘livestock’ remain a black box…
That’s because, until recently, scientists didn’t take their cognition seriously. “When I went to my first research conferences, people didn’t understand why I was studying the minds of farm animals,” says Christian Nawroth, a behavioral biologist at FBN. Why waste your time if it’s not going to improve milk or meat production, he recalls them asking. “They didn’t see the point.”
Nawroth did. Though he began his career researching decision-making in great apes, he switched to livestock in 2010. He was looking for a Ph.D. position when an intriguing opportunity popped up at a German zoo. He came to run some pilot tests on minipigs, exploring whether the animals were capable of “object permanence”—understanding that something still exists when it “disappears” behind a barrier, an important milestone in the cognitive development of children. Nawroth was hooked. “Almost nothing had been done on farm animals,” he says…
All of this may be keeping young scientists away, says Rebecca Nordquist, a biological psychologist at Utrecht University who explores cognition in pigs and chickens. There are only about a half-dozen labs researching ‘livestock’ cognition worldwide, and no conferences dedicated exclusively to the topic. She also worries that many people may not want to know if the animals they think of as dinner turn out to have rich inner lives. “Some would prefer to keep them dumb.”
Still, Nawroth is optimistic. He’s spearheading a major initiative called ManyGoats that will connect dozens of researchers across the globe to share data, increasing sample sizes and bringing more rigor to ‘livestock’ studies. “I hope it will be an example for other labs,” he says.
Jean-Loup Rault, head of the Institute of Animal Welfare Science at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, is starting to see interest from researchers who used to scoff at farm animal studies. When he presented some of his early ‘livestock’ cognition findings in 2010 at the Society for Neuroscience conference—which typically attracts tens of thousands of attendees—he was the only one with a pig poster. “Now, there’s more of us,” says Rault, a collaborator on FBN’s pig empathy and fake apple tree studies, “and people are becoming more interested in our work.”
Krupenye says the growing pains in the farm animal field remind him of dog cognition research, which had to fight for its own respect a couple of decades ago when it was still in its infancy. “Dogs have really helped people see that there’s a lot of value to studying species beyond primates and rodents,” he says. “I think the ‘livestock’ folks are riding a similar wave.”
At the very least, Nawroth hopes the work will give people new respect for animals that have been overlooked for so long. Getting inside their minds will expand our own, he says. “Different species play by different rules. We have to see the world not just how we see it, but how they do”. SOURCE…
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