Let chickens be chickens

A week or so ago I encountered a letter to the editor in our local newspaper that made me peevish. Its author opined that chickens have better welfare when they are kept in rather than out of cages, because when not caged they are liable to get parasites and cannibalize each other.

I responded. But the letter to the editor format restricted me to 250 words, and I had more to say. Luckily, I have you guys to rant to! So here is my original piece in full.


Dan Miner's letter, published Dec. 5, sets up a straw-man argument about the welfare of chickens kept in versus out of cages. I'm responding from my experiences as a veterinarian with a special interest in animal welfare.

Are chickens in cages free from walking in their own feces? Yes – because they're standing on wire, which is unhealthy for their feet. Are chickens out of cages walking in their own feces? Only if you keep them crowded too close together. If you keep them with enough space that their surroundings don't fill with poop, then no, they won't be walking in poop.

Are chickens in cages able to engage in cannabalism? No – but they're denied healthy social interactions as well. Chickens don't actually want to kill and eat other chickens. They just do it if they're highly stressed. Keep them in a healthy environment where they have some space and the ability to engage in species-appropriate activities, like perching and scratching for bugs, and they'd much rather do those things instead.

Does the cage system protect chickens from parasites? Sure – and keeping a human in a glass bubble keeps them physically free of parasites, too, but would anyone with a normal immune system be willing to live like that just to avoid normal diseases? Healthy, unstressed chickens have robust immune systems that can handle normal diseases. But a stresssed, crowded animal isn't a healthy animal. When bird flu swept through commercial chicken farms this summer, resulting in massive numbers of deaths, which populations stayed healthiest? The outdoor birds, who were unstressed because they had the ability to engage in species-appropriate behaviors, and therefore had robust immune systems. The stressed-out, crowded indoor birds had weak immune systems with no ability to fight off the virus, and were so packed together that when it got into those populations, it swept straight through.

Chickens are only healthier in cages compared to out of cages if the out-of-cage environment is a crowded, stressful one. Many of those environments are, of course. I encourage those who care about chicken welfare to purchase eggs from chickens who are “pastured” or kept “on grass.” Mr. Miner is correct that “cage free” doesn't mean good welfare. He just doesn't realize that there's a better way to raise these animals – with enough space to move around and the opportunity to scratch around and hunt for bugs. Those are happy chickens.

Who funds dog research?

As I move through my training and think ahead to my future career, I wonder: who will pay for all this research I want to do on dogs? I have so many questions to ask!

• What changes happen in the canine brain as it enters, and then leaves, the socialization period?
• How is the brain of a fearful dog different from that of a confident dog?
• What are the genetic differences behind these variations?
• How do environmental differences (prenatal stress, early learning, adult life) change the brain?

In other words, what are the mechanisms in the brain that differ in fearful dogs — receptors, neurotransmitters, synaptic wiring? And how can I learn about them without using invasive (painful and/or terminal) techniques?

Who are the caretakers of Dog, the species, who care about fearfulness? We as dog owners and lovers care, but dog owners and lovers aren’t the ones who are trained to heal unhealthy dogs, to perform research aimed at understanding them, and we (mostly) aren’t the ones who breed them. So who are the groups who are the caretakers of Dog, and what subsets of Dog do they care for?

Veterinarians

We (I am a veterinarian) are trained to heal sick dogs. Relatively few veterinarians perform research compared to those who engage solely in clinical practice. But some do perform research: most commonly as faculty at veterinary schools alongside a clinical practice, or less commonly as researchers without a clinical practice at research instititutions.

Veterinary research, as a result of this strong emphasis on healing the unhealthy, is focused on clinical results. Veterinarians most commonly perform research which asks questions about the effectiveness of particular techniques — medications, surgical approaches, new equipment. Veterinary research very rarely addresses root questions about mechanisms, particularly in the area of behavior. Rather than asking “How are the brains of fearful dogs different?”, veterinary research is more likely to ask how we could fix a fearful dog: “Does this medication make a fearful dog less fearful?”

In fact, as I pursue my mechanism-based questions, I am asked if I miss being a veterinarian. The perception is that because I am engaged in basic, rather than clinical, research, I am no longer working as a veterinarian.

Basic science researchers

If veterinarians do clinical research studies, then who does basic research biomedical studies, studies that look not at how to fix problems but at how the body works? Ph.D. researchers are more likely to do this sort of research, which is why I am currently engaged in obtaining a Ph.D.

Traditionally, Ph.D. researchers have not been interested in dogs. In fact, way back in 2004 when I was originally deciding between a Ph.D. and a D.V.M., I was told by a Ph.D. animal behaviorist, “Ph.D.s don’t study domesticated animals. Veterinarians study those.” (Actually, veterinarians mostly just try to fix unhealthy domesticated animals, not study the healthy ones.)

That perception has changed in a big way in the intervening eleven years. There are now multiple laboratories studying dogs. But where does their funding come from — who cares enough about dogs as dogs, not as models for human problems, to provide the impressive funding needed for a genomics study? (The work I am doing for my Ph.D., sequencing messenger RNA, costs around $45,000.)

The U.S. federal government

The traditional source of funding for basic research is the federal government: the National Institutes of Health for health-based research and the National Science Foundation for more basic research. But these two massive institutions are very much focused on human health — as they should be, as they are funded by the tax dollars of American citizens. The economy can’t support all the research American researchers would like to do, and getting an NIH or NSF grant is becoming more and more difficult as grant funding is cut. Funding to study dogs as models of human disease? Maybe, but isn’t it easier to study laboratory rodents (on which you can perform invasive studies) or work on humans directly? Funding to study dogs as dogs? Go lie down until it passes.

In my experience, the small number of laboratories directly studying dogs are either studying them as models for questions about human health or evolution, operate on a shoestring budget, or have great trouble obtaining funding for what they want to do.

Animal welfare organizations

So who cares about dogs? Animal welfare organizations, some of which are national in scope and do perform research. Some major players in this field are the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), the Center for Shelter Dogs (CSD), and the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). I am most familiar with the research coming out of the ASPCA and the CSD, and it is exciting stuff. But it is again mostly focused on applied questions: how can we help the shelter dogs in our care?

I reviewed some of the research these two organizations have performed on how to identify and treat food aggression in shelter dogs in my story for the Bark on shelter behavioral assessments. This was ground-breaking research and I am really glad to see it published. But it doesn’t ask the basic (i.e., non-applied) research questions I am interested in: what is it about the brains of these dogs that differs from the brains of dogs without food aggression? That kind of research doesn’t have immediate applied benefit. You can’t take it to a shelter worker with a recommendation about whether or not to put a food aggressive dog on the adoption floor. It is incredibly impressive that these shelter-focused organizations perform any research at all, and it is absolutely appropriate that the research they perform should have a highly applied focus, with clear questions that, when answered, will provide guidance on how to improve the lives of shelter dogs, immediately. They do not have the resources to pursue these sort of mechanism questions that I want to ask, which do not have immediate applicability.

So who cares about understanding how dog brains work, with the hope that that information will provide a base for future applied research? Who cares about the whole species, not just the subset in shelters or the subset in hospitals?

Breed organizations

Breed organizations care very much about the health and welfare of dogs, and in fact have provided funding into the mechanisms behind health issues specific to their breed. A recent paper about associations between spay/neuter status and health issues in Golden Retrievers was partially funded by the American Kennel Club’s Canine Health Foundation (AKC/CHF), and a similar study on Vizslas was funded by the Vizsla Club of America Welfare Foundation. (I blogged about these studies elsewhere.)

These organizations can fund basic research on how and why particular diseases occur in their breeds, and may even be willing to fund expensive genetic studies, such as a recent one on the genetics of cancer in Golden Retrievers, supported in part by both the AKC/CHF and the Golden Retriever Foundation. However, their focus is very much on the problems of a particular breed. My questions are broader: why do dogs of all breeds have different personalities, some more or less fearful? These organizations are really the caretakers of breed subsets of Dog, not of Dog itself.

Who, then?

Who does that leave as a group willing to fund studies on Dog? On problems common to all breeds? On problems which may or may not provide good models for humans? If I hope to one day run a laboratory which studies these problems, who can I hope to help pay for the research?

I would be remiss if I did not mention Morris Animal Foundation here. While their important Golden Retriever Lifetime Study happens to focus on the health issues of a single breed, their mission is to fund research into studies of small animals (dogs and cats), livestock, and wild animals, with no breed limitations. This group is doing important work, and I applaud them.

But one organization is not enough for a laboratory to depend on for survival, especially in these times with research funding so hard to come by. And so I wonder: are we, the dog lovers of the world, the ones to start supporting research into what it is to be a dog? We, who own dogs of all breeds and mixes, with all sorts of problems, who know what problems most plague us as owners — not just medical problems, but behavioral ones?

And so I leave you with my dreams of crowdfunding, in which a researcher proposes a study and asks the public to support it through donations. Such an approach allows the dog community to take the task of answering basic questions about Dogness into their own hands. This direct connection between a researcher and the community affected by their research is a new benefit of this age of social media. Is this approach right for this particular problem? Time will tell.

The spectrum of hoarding

There was almost no furniture in the entire house. This was unusual for hoarder houses, which are usually packed full of stuff or just of trash. But she was a somewhat unusual hoarder, with only 26 cats and one dog. We stood in the living room and talked to her about her animals. We could see into the kitchen, which was swarming with cats, on the counters, poking out of empty cabinets, sleeping in the sink. The woman we were talking to told us how she loved them but how her son had called us in because he was concerned about them and about her.

While we talked, her dog urinated in the middle of the empty floor in front of us. She didn't notice. The room contained a couch and an entertainment center and absolutely nothing else: the entertainment center had a few knicknacks but was mostly empty. On it sat the box of flea preventative that our team had given her months ago. It was unopened.

And everywhere was the smell of urine. I could barely stand to be in the room, but I could do so without a mask, which made it one of the cleaner hoarder homes. All I could think of was getting outside and getting a breath of air that was not thick with ammonia, so thick that my eyes watered and I could not fill my lungs. But this woman lived here. She could no longer smell it. She no longer noticed or cared when her dog urinated in the middle of the floor. And I remembered another time I had smelled this smell: at a cat shelter in another part of the country.

That was in rural New England. The two women running the place called it a shelter, but I knew it was really a hoarding house. They did not know how many cats they had. They would find cats unexpectedly dead, because no one had noticed for days or weeks when they were sick. And everywhere the smell. Not as bad as in the hoarder house in the big city, but bad enough to scare away adopters. Yes, they opened their doors to adopters. They advertised their cats for adoption. But adopters who brought these cats home risked bringing a sick animal into their lives, or contracting ringworm from their new pet, a story I heard unfold at least once from this shelter. The women running the shelter grilled every potential adopter and turned many away for not being good enough for their cats. And they continued taking in more cats — if they turned them away, they said, what would happen to them? But could another fate have been worse than dying trapped in that place, where adopters did not want to come, and were turned away when they did? Was this place a shelter or a hoarding house or some weird combination of the two?

But the combination isn’t weird. It happens all the time. I saw it again at a shelter in the deep South. This shelter proclaimed that they would kill no animals, and they did not, even the dogs who had been there for seven or eight years, that had gone insane and were unadoptable. These dogs were loving with the shelter staff, but when I came within a dozen yards of their enclosures they would erupt in terrifying, violent barking. I had no doubt that if I entered their enclosures I would be badly bitten. One dog was not aggressive, but hardly seemed to see the rest of the world any longer: he spun in circles around his enclosure, up on the roof of his dog house, down on the ground again, paws hitting exactly the same point every time. Over and over and over.

And the dogs who were not yet insane were not moving out fast enough. I could see their fates. This shelter was so overwhelmed with the number of dogs they were managing that they did not have the energy to keep these dogs mentally healthy, or to do the extra legwork it takes to adopt out a large dog in an area like the South which is so overpopulated with them. These dogs needed transfers to different shelters, they needed adoption events, they needed foster care to get a break from the shelter. They got none of those things. And as soon as a cage opened, it was filled with a new dog. This shelter actually transferred dogs in from outside their community. If they had not done so, they told us, what would have happened to those dogs? Where else could they have gone?

When I started to look, I started to see it everywhere. How many shelters provided enough space for their cats? Even the shelters that have big condo-style cages for cats in their adoption areas, with enough space to move around and a separate area for the litter box, even these shelters still have cats in tiny three by three foot cages in the back, in the sick rooms, in the intake and holding rooms: not enough room for a cat to stretch out, not enough room to get away from the litter box to eat. Even these shelters tell me of course they can’t use that antibiotic, because it must be given twice a day, and they don’t have time to visit so many sick animals twice a day, so they must use the one that doesn’t work as well but can be given less often. Even these shelters say, Of course we would love to have dog play groups, but we don’t have enough trained staff to manage them.

So what is sheltering and what is hoarding? A good shelter provides a needed service: a brief place for an animal to stop on its road to a new home, some medical care, some help finding that home. Keeping that stay brief is the hard part. It is, in fact, a very hard part, balancing keeping the animal healthy (it’s hard and potentially unethical to adopt out a sick pet), finding the right adopter (for that pit bull type dog that looks like row upon row of others in your shelter, for that orange cat that doesn’t come to the front of his cage to meet adopters), keeping them mentally healthy while you’re at it (play groups, training, just plain time out of the cage and time with humans).

And keeping large animals like dogs takes space. In fact, keeping a small animal like a cat takes space, much more space than we as a sheltering community realized until recently. Sheltering can so easily start to slip down the spectrum. It is a spectrum! Many shelters, real shelters, shelters that have legal non-profit status with the government, shelters that don’t smell like urine and have lots of volunteers and get grants and have spay-neuter services, yes these shelters too can fail to provide minimally acceptable care for their animals. Simply because they have too many.

What’s the answer? In one sense, it is simple. Call in someone from the outside, who can see your facility with unbiased eyes. Someone who doesn’t have to answer all the calls for pets that need homes. Someone who can look at the pets that you have and tell you how you are keeping them. This person must know how to assess humane capacity, so it can’t be just any animal lover. They should be able to look at your facility, know how much space is appropriate for animals of different sizes, and calculate how much space you have for each animal. Then they must look at your staffing, and calculate how much staff time you have for each animal. Not just to feed and clean them, but to spend time with them. To notice when they are sick: to look at them every day, carefully, and think about what they need and how to get it to them. To not be running ragged putting out fires, but to be able to plan adoption events, and to notice that dog that’s been here for months and needs special work to get out.

When this person tells you how many animals you can care for humanely, not just how many you can fit in your facility, you will be shocked. You will deny it. You will say that’s half what you can handle. You will point to your records: you’ve had many more than that for years! But they will insist: yes, you’ve had more. But you haven’t had them humanely. You have had a toe on the road to the hoarder end of the spectrum.

So in another sense, it is not at all simple. Because embracing humane capacity means accepting that you have not done as well in the past for your animals as you could. It means not beating yourself up over this, not feeling guilty, not indulging in denial. It means moving forward: it means promising yourself and the animals in your care that you will do better in the future.

And even harder, it means saying no. No to the animals that need a place. No to the people who just can’t find a home for their pit bull type dog but have to move, and the new place does not take animals. No to the mom whose dog bit her child but is such a loving dog with adults. No to the stray cat who is so sweet. Surely you can find homes for these animals? If you don’t, who will?

But that is the central point: you can’t do it humanely, but you try anyway, you will add to the problem. Sheltering is where it is because shelters try to do too much, and if a shelter’s doors are open, animals will pass through them. Shelters which have put waiting lists into place have found that many people do manage to find homes for their animals, if they have to keep trying. Some don’t, and they wait until a place opens. Will these people abandon their animals on the street? Will they take them to a quiet spot and shoot them between the eyes? Very, very rarely does this happen: when it does, it is big news. But you know what? Doing that is illegal. And that is where we need to prevent it: with laws, and enforcement of them. Not by saying, Okay, I will take over your responsibility for you.

That is what we as a society must embrace: responsibility. Not taking in animals that we can’t care for appropriately. And not accepting someone else’s responsibility. Being strong, and doing only what we can, and no more. Because by doing more, we actually do less.

Organic standards and animal welfare

Over on Animal Science Review, Austin J. Bouck just posted his paper, Do organic animal operations encourage management decisions that negatively impact animal welfare? Personally, I do tend to buy organic dairy products when I can in hopes that I’m contributing to improved animal welfare, even though deep in my heart I suspect I’m doing no such thing. In veterinary school, classmates told me they avoided buying organic because of things they had seen on organic farms. I’ve argued before that the best way to ensure the welfare of the animals whose products you consume is to make your purchases at a local farmer’s market, but of course not everyone has access to those. So this question of whether organic is good for animal welfare or not is a pressing one.

Austin starts out with a discussion of terminology. The word “organic” has a legal meaning, but many producers also use terms like “natural” and “free-range,” which don’t. What do these terms mean to producers and what do they mean to consumers? I have heard veterinarians dismiss these terms as meaningless, but Austin describes a tendency among organic producers to view their ecocentric model of farm management as a way of managing their animals “naturally.” In an ecocentric model, overall sustainability of the farm and interactions with the environment take priority over individual health.

If that’s the case, what are the consequences to individual health of prioritizing the environment over the individual? Austin uses as his examples dairy cows, focusing on the use of antibiotics to treat infected udders, and chickens, focusing on the use of medication for parasite infection. In both cases, he describes the strong incentives for organic farmers to withhold treatment for disease, as once an animal has been treated with an antibiotic or antiparasitic, its products (milk, meat, or eggs) can no longer be considered organic. Austin explores alternative treatments and concludes that none are effective. He notes that in Europe, use of antibiotics and antiparasitics to treat clinical disease is legal in organic production; only preventive use is banned. He advocates a change in U.S. regulations to imitate the European model, on the reasonable theory that if incentive to withhold treatment is removed, then more sick animals will be treated.

I agree! I would have been very interested to hear some statistics about how many animals go untreated on organic farms, or how far illness on these farms might be allowed to progress before animals are treated, compared farms using conventional methods. Austin doesn’t say, and I think this is because no one really knows. It would be an interesting line of research, and possibly a necessary one if we want to get the American public fired up to support change in the current regulations. If a video of a sick cow being moved by a forklift was invigorating to the animal welfare community, maybe some videos of untreated sick animals on organic farms would be as well.

Check out the paper. It’s an interesting read.

Perceptions of snoring pugs

Researchers at a veterinary hospital were studying the prevalence of particular diseases in different breeds of dogs, and owner recognition of the diseases. They asked the owners of 285 dogs about a particular respiratory disease. 31 dogs met the criteria for the disease, and 19 had difficulty breathing according to the owners’ answers, but only 18 (of 31) owners believed that their dogs had respiratory disease. So far, so good — veterinarians need to educate better about this disease (and I’m here today to help with that). But the really interesting part is this: of the 17 dogs that had been referred to the hospital for suspicion of this exact disease, 7 owners (41%) stated that their dogs did not have respiratory disease — the disease that they were seeing a specialist for that day.

What is the disease? Brachycephalic obstructive airway syndrome (BOAS). This is a common disease among the flat-faced dog breeds, especially pugs, bulldogs, and Pekinese. These dogs have been bred to have flatter, more human-like faces, but as their muzzles have shortened, the soft tissue in the back of their mouths has not. They are left with excess tissue in the back of their throats which significantly blocks airflow (elongated soft palate). They also often have tiny nostrils (stenotic nares). These two physiologic handicaps together cause so much resistance in the path of the air moving from nose to lung that eventually the inside of their throat can become further deformed, increasing the resistance to airflow (everted laryngeal saccules).

Points used to measure the length of a dog’s skull (A,B) and muzzle (B,C). Compare the labrador retriever’s B,C length (top) with the pug’s (bottom).

So yes, this makes it hard to breathe, and if you want to see for yourself, try this experiment: squeeze your nostrils shut so that only about 1/4 of the normal space is left. Keep your mouth closed. Now exercise. And imagine breathing that way for your entire life.

I think it is probably a lot like when you are very congested and trying to sleep: you can’t sleep with your mouth open, but when you close it you can’t get enough oxygen. A lot of these dogs constantly pant in order to get enough air. 100% of them snore at night, and 32% snore while awake, compared to 21% of normal dogs who snore at night. The noises pugs make are certainly unusual — when I walk in to a veterinary clinic I know if a pug is in the room before I see it. A lot of people find these noises cute. What these researchers found surprising was how many people found the noises normal.

Normal for the breed, that is; the owners who stated that their dogs did not have respiratory disease wrote things like “No, but he is a pug!” Breed-specific problems have come to be considered not problems simply because they are expected. I have had veterinarians tell me that they recommend dogs for corrective surgery for BOAS simply based on the breed. When I asked one surgeon what criteria she had used to recommend surgery for our six month old patient, she replied, “He’s a bulldog.” (Those owners agreed to the surgery, but initially hesitated because they were concerned that widening their dog’s nostrils would change his appearance.)

Where to place the blame? I feel that veterinarians are doing very little to make this problem clear to owners (as much as we will shake our heads in despair in the back room when the owner is not around). One of my daily tasks in veterinary school was to write up an assessment of the health status of my patients. If I had a flat-faced patient with loud breathing, I would certainly note that in my list of physical characteristics. But I did not include it in my list of problems which needed to be addressed. The dog was invariably in the hospital for some other problem, and I knew that I’d be considered obnoxious, if not a troublemaker, if I called out this other problem which everyone was aware of and no one was trying to address.

I’ll do better in the future, and I hope that other veterinarians will start talking more to their clients about the reality of the problems these dogs face. It is upsetting that a veterinarian can refer an owner to a specialist for dealing with BOAS without making clear to the owner that the dog has a disease. Just because the dog has always had the problem, and just because the problem was intentionally selected for, does not mean it is not a disease. Dog owners need to start pushing back on breeders and buying only puppies who breathe quietly (awake and asleep!). Breeders need to start selecting for somewhat longer muzzles, long enough that dogs can breathe properly.

And the dogs who are already out there with breathing problems? If your flat-faced dog makes loud noises when he breathes, particularly when he is awake, he probably isn’t breathing comfortably. If your primary care veterinarian doesn’t think your dog has a problem, get a second opinion from a veterinary surgeon (someone who preferably has a title ending in “DACVS” to indicate that they are a surgical specialist). Dogs who can’t breathe comfortably don’t have a good quality of life. It seems obvious, but sometimes we need to say it.


Packer, R. (2012). Do dog owners perceive the clinical signs related to conformational inherited disorders as 'normal' for the breed? A potential constraint to improving canine welfare, Animal Welfare, 21 (1s) DOI: 10.7120/096272812X13345905673809

The Dairy Welfare Farm Tour, part 2: growing calves

(Continued from The Dairy Welfare Farm Tour, part 1.)

We pulled up at the farm where Dr. Mulain performs a weekly herd check every Tuesday morning, checking a bunch of potentially pregnant cows to determine if they are in fact knocked up. Lots of rectals! While we were sticking our arms inside of cows, Dr. Mulain pointed out that we can tell a lot about how cows are handled by how they respond to us. When you are in the middle of a herd of cows, do they panic and run away? They have probably not had great experiences with humans in the past. Do they come up to you, sniff you, lick you, follow you around, and generally make pains of themselves? It is likely they have had good experiences with humans in the past. These cows were like mosquitoes; I was literally batting them away. When I yelled “Shoo!” and waved my arms at them, they stared at me blankly. They had clearly been handled gently by the farm workers.

After the herd check was over, we visited the calves in their hutches. This farm used the conventional method of raising calves: separate them from their mothers immediately and raise them in tiny hutches that look like plastic igloos. The hutches are typically clustered together in a little village, but must be far enough apart that the calves can't touch each other. Calves typically live in individual hutches like this from birth until shortly after weaning.

Although the little village of hutches is adorable, something in me rebels at the idea of raising social animals in isolation like this, where they cannot touch another member of their species. Why do we do it? We raise them separately to keep them cleaner. Calves inevitably have diarrhea, and if you raise them together, that will be the method of transmission of all sorts of (sometimes fatal) diseases. So it is safer for them to keep them separate until their immune systems mature. Also, taking them away from their mothers leaves more milk for sale (they are most often raised on milk replacer, which costs less than the real stuff).

This method of raising calves is the conventionally accepted one in the industry, and is what we were taught about in our large animal medicine class. But Dr. Mulain told us about a new method that some farmers are trying, and took us to see it in practice on other farms. You can apparently raise healthy calves in groups if you free feed them, in other words, let them consume as much milk, or replacer, as they want. With the extra nutrition, their immune systems are more robust. The calves grow faster, too.

Dr. Mulain said wryly, “Remember, this isn't abnormally fast growth. This is normal growth.” His perspective is that the dairy industry has been feeding calves smaller amounts to cut costs, but this has resulted in weakened immune systems and smaller calves. With time, we have come to see these weakened immune systems as normal, but they are not.

We saw one farm in which calves had access to a big bucket of milk replacer. They were living in a group of just a few calves. Another farm had turned about ten calves in with three lactating cows. Cows chosen for nanny duty were the low producing cows — the ones later in their lactation cycles who produce less milk. It is amazing that we have bred cows to produce so much milk that a low producing cow can easily support three calves! The calves didn’t bond with a particular cow, but just partook of the nearest milk bar. Because these were low producing cows, they were by definition late in their lactation cycle, so it is unlikely that any of the calves were actually theirs.

This approach to raising calves feels emotionally better to me. I don’t like to see babies of social species raised out of physical contact with other social animals. So the approach to raising calves in groups is appealing. Time will tell if it works well, producing healthy calves and saving farmers money.