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Cows Have Best Friends and Get Stressed When Apart

Author Bio

Kate is an Assistant at One Green Planet. She supports in the running of One... Read More

Turns out cow besties are “utterly” inseparable (ha!). That’s right, just like you and me when a cow is apart from their best friend for extended periods of time they just aren’t themselves. Cows are highly sociable animals that experience stress when they are isolated, just another fact that shows that farm animals are someones not somethings.

Conditions on factory farms are enough to stress the bejesus out of any living creature, but to cows that are extra responsive to being separated from offspring and friends forcing them to live in crates where they can’t move their heads, let alone interact with another cow seems particularly malicious.

In the report that discovered cow’s love for their friends, scientists tracked the heart rate and cortisol levels of cows when they were with or apart from other members of their herd. What the report found was that cows who were isolated showed significant signs of stress which ultimately negatively impacted the amount of milk they produced. One of the go-to justifications behind the industrialization of milk production is to glean high-yields of milk from animals but if a stressed cow that is forcibly separated from her calves minutes after birth and shoved into a robotic milking machine actually produces LESS milk then how does that logic figure…

Just thinking out-loud here. So to show solidarity for our four-legged BFFs, it is time we all ditch dairy (if you haven’t yet!) and keep the love going!

Image Credit: C.E. Price / Wikipedia Commons