Scientists Are Toilet Training Cows To Reduce Emissions

 Scientists Are Toilet Training Cows To Reduce Emissions

Researchers in Germany recently demonstrated that cattle can learn to go to the bathroom to reduce some of their climate impact. By making young cows urinate in latrines made of grass, the team of animal behavior and agricultural science experts stopped the natural production of nitrous oxide caused by cow urine.

Cows are notorious for their contributions to greenhouse gas emissions in large-scale agriculture; the animals burp (and to a lesser extent, fart) methane, and their urine and feces combine to produce ammonia, which is not itself a greenhouse gas, but is converted to nitrous oxide by soil microbes. The team trained nearly a dozen calves to urinate in a makeshift latrine, dubbed MooLoo, thus preventing the urine from becoming part of the problem. The research was published Monday in Current Biology.

"It is generally assumed that cattle are not capable of controlling defecation or urination," Jan Langbein, an animal psychologist at the Research Institute of Farm Animal Biology (FBN) in Germany and co-author of the paper said in a press release. "Cattle, like many other farm animals, are quite intelligent and can learn a lot - why shouldn't they learn to use the toilet?"

Training the cows was a fairly simple process on paper. First, the scientists penned 16 of the animals in the latrine area. When the cows urinated, they were given food or sugar water, tacit endorsements of their decisions. The next step was to teach them not to urinate in the pasture, which was done by implementing an unpleasant stimulus each time they did so. That stimulus was originally a loud noise, but when the researchers realized that the animals didn't care much for it, they changed it to spraying the cows with water, a relatively harmless "bad cow" message. The team found that the cows' ability to hold it in and go to the latrine was equivalent to a child's ability, or even greater than that of toddlers.

In addition to the benefits of reducing the amount of nitrous oxide in the air, it's a testament to bovine intelligence. The animals we eat are often underestimated intellectually (perhaps because we don't want to think about it), but these toilet-trained cows are just the latest to demonstrate farm animal intelligence. Other recent research found that pigs can play video games by operating a joystick with their snouts.

Langbein's team hopes to bring the latrines to other sites and increase the number of toilet-trained cows. "To do this, we must first automate the entire training procedure and adapt it to farm conditions," he told Gizmodo in an email. "We want to address this in a follow-up project."

There are a couple of limitations. First, not all cows can be toilet trained. Only 10 of the 16 calves quickly learned to urinate in the right place and were able to reproduce that action routinely. That's a problem for anyone trying to scale up the practice (there are more than a billion cows on Earth). Second, the experiment did not cover defecation, and cow poop also contains ammonia. In addition, there is the big problem of methane, a greenhouse gas 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide, linked to cow burps and farts. Some researchers have focused on feeding seaweed to cows to reduce methane, but that, like latrines, cannot yet be scaled in any way.

More importantly, however, animal husbandry is one small piece of the climate puzzle. The recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report named methane as a major climate enemy, one that is also related to natural gas production and extraction, as well as the aforementioned cow behavior. That said, nitrous oxide remains a problem and the overwhelming majority of emissions come from agricultural sources, but it seems unlikely that large livestock farms will implement mass toilet training anytime soon.