Potty training cows to reduce farming’s impact on the environment?! Whatever next…
BLOG: In a desperate attempt to make raising cows less damaging to the environment, scientists have come up with a ridiculous solution: teach cows to poo and wee in ‘toilets’. Why come up with a quick fix when the real answer is obvious?
When faced with the overwhelming evidence of the disproportionate impact of farming on the environment, anyone with any common sense would say the answer was to farm less. Add the fact that we don’t need to eat animals to thrive, and logic tells us that we should just do away with animal farming altogether.
From the 20 meat and dairy companies emit more carbon than Germany, Britain or France, says Friends of the Earth to the ammonia being released via farm run-off and the devastation to waterways this causes - as was brought to light recently with the news that the Netherlands could soon force farmers to cut herd sizes to tackle its nitrogen crisis - we can now add another farming-related climate catastrophe to the growing list: nitrous oxide, produced by microbes that feed off the ammonia from cow urine and faeces, and the third most significant greenhouse gas after methane and carbon dioxide.
In response, according to a report in the Guardian this week, scientists have had some success training cows to urinate in certain places with the intention being to dispose of the waste before it ends up leaching into the environment. Basically, cow toilets.
“Cattle, like many other animals, are quite clever and they can learn a lot,” said Jan Langbein, an animal psychologist at the Research Institute for Farm Animal Biology (FBN) in Germany. “Why shouldn’t they be able to learn how to use a toilet?”
Apparently, 11 of the 16 calves researchers trained via a system of rewards and punishments (being squirted with water) took to using the toilet. This comes as no surprise to us because cows aren’t just clever, they’re also emotionally complex, sentient beings. The very fact that cows are able to learn should be a sign that they aren’t to be dismissed as unthinking, unfeeling commodities solely for the production of milk and meat.
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This isn’t the first hair-brained scheme the farming industry has come up with to answer its environmentalist critics. The National Farmers Union (NFU) in the UK is a huge proponent of feeding cows seaweed additives to stop them belching and farting and producing so much methane, as detailed in its bizarre Achieving Net Zero strategy and critiqued in Dr Alex Lockwood’s analysis for Surge.
These are just a few of the many measures proposed by the industry to curb both its planet-destroying ways and its profound lack of ethics, along with gene-editing animals so that they feel less pain thereby bypassing welfare concerns entirely. The irony is that without being able to cause discomfort to cows, the training method proposed by the toilet researchers wouldn’t work. It’s either train them to use the loo to save the environment or turn off their ability to suffer so that people feel less guilty eating them.
It seems fairly obvious that every so-called ‘solution’ the pro-farming scientists come up with are little more than band-aids addressing individual issues without tackling the real problem. There are only so many fixes and shortcuts that can be taken when the real solution seems utterly obvious. Just stop farming animals and switch to less harmful plant-based food production using sustainable methods.
Andrew Gough is Media and Investigations Manager for Surge.
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