Cows can tell by your face whether you're friend or foe

Humans and cattle share a long history. Domesticated from a now-extinct ox species around 10,500 years ago, cows have become a major source of protein, dairy, and leather worldwide.

While we think we know a lot about them, it's not clear whether they know a lot about us.

Studies have found that some domestic animals, such as sheep and pigs, can recognize individual humans, but these abilities have not been tested in cows.

Now, a study led by Léa Lansade, a senior researcher in animal cognition and welfare at the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment (INRAE), has shown that cows can differentiate between familiar and unfamiliar faces.

Facial perception is considered a key element of social recognition among primates, as faces convey important information, like age, sex, and individual identity.

Lansade explains that people who work with cattle often have very different opinions about their cognition. Some consider them rather “simple” animals, while others describe them as highly observant and socially intelligent. Researchers wanted to bring scientific data into this debate and better understand what cows actually perceive, remember, and understand about us.

Researchers included 32 Prim’Holstein cows (Bos Taurus Taurus) aged between 21 and 15 months. Four caretakers had been engaged in the daily care and feeding of each cow since birth, but the animals may have occasionally encountered other individuals, such as students or colleagues visiting the farm. Cows used in this research had no prior exposure to similar experimental procedures.

The researchers filmed eight adult men between 30 and 60 years of age, including four familiar caretakers and four unfamiliar colleagues, whom the cows had never seen before.

Researchers then conducted two tests: a visual preference test and a cross-modal test. During the visual preference test, researchers played two muted videos, which were simultaneously shown to the cows. Each video displayed either a familiar or an unfamiliar human face.

Measuring the amount of time each cow stared at the silent videos, they found their test animals looked longer at videos of unfamiliar persons.

During the cross-modal test, a congruent or an incongruent voice accompanied the videos. The cows looked significantly longer at videos that were congruent with the voice being played.

These two results show that cows do not perceive all humans as “a single, undifferentiated category”. Instead, they can distinguish between familiar and unfamiliar individuals, recognizing people they have previously met.

Furthermore, they can form cross-modal representations of these people, linking different details about a person's face and voice into a single, cohesive framework.

Lansade suggests that their observations of the cross-modal recognition reveal that cows form mental representations of familiar people and process social information in a much more sophisticated way than previously assumed.

The research team also assessed the cows' heart rates as they watched the videos. Neither familiar nor unfamiliar faces or voices appeared to affect the cows’ emotional response.

These findings also suggest that cows can integrate multiple sensory cues. This is indicative of a higher level of cognitive processing than that required for unimodal recognition, for example. Unimodal recognition helps identify an individual using only a single type of sensory input.

Researchers note in the paper, “In this study, using visual preference and cross-modal tests, we showed that cows are able to process human faces presented in 2D on videos and to associate familiar and unfamiliar faces with the corresponding voices by integrating multiple sensory modalities.”

The team is hopeful that these findings pave the way to examine a wider range of cognitive abilities in cows, such as how they acquire knowledge, process information, and develop selective interactions with humans.

Lansade shares, “These findings profoundly change the way we look at farm animals. And we know that the better we understand an animal, the better we tend to treat it.”

This research was published in PLOS.

Source: Scimex

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