London, July 30 (IANS) Cows have attracted the curiosity of British scientists as to how they make friends among themselves.
In a three-year study, funded by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and DairyCo, the levy-funded organisation that works on behalf of British dairy farmers, scientists will try to understand more about “social networking” within dairy herds.
They aim to help farmers improve the health and welfare of their cows, thereby increasing milk yields, Daily Mail reported.
High-tech proximity collars have been fitted to cows on a farm in Cullompton, Devon county for the research’s first stage. These collars use radio signals to determine how close one cow is to another, allowing scientists to map the animals’ social interactions.
Study leader Darren Croft, from the University of Exeter’s Animal Behaviour Research Group, said: “Emerging evidence on wild animal populations supports the idea that the group structure and relationships between the animals affect their health and wellbeing.
“Cows are social animals that form important group structures, and the addition or removal of animals from an established group can significantly alter its dynamics.”
“We want to find out just how important these group structures are. Dairy farmers take a range of factors into account when deciding how to structure groups of cows. We hope that the results of our study may contribute towards a blueprint for herd management to help farmers continue to improve the health and welfare of their cows,” said Croft.
“We will look at the nature of the interactions to see just how relationships are formed and maintained within the herd,” said another researcher, Natasha Boyland.
