New research has shown that cows can be successfully toilet-trained – and potentially help farmers reduce water contamination and greenhouse gas emissions.
The work was conducted by University of Auckland-affiliated researchers Lindsay Matthews and Douglas Elliffe on a farm in Germany in 2015, run by the Federal Research Institute for Animal Health.
If cows could be trained to urinate in a ‘toilet’ at least some of the time, nitrogen could be captured and dealt with before it pollutes water or turns into nitrous oxide gas.
“We’ve shown proof of concept that we can train cows and train them easily,” Elliffe, a University of Auckland professor of psychology, said.
“Cattle urine is a major cause of our nitrogen problem. Any reduction in that would make a difference.”
Matthews says modelling work on Dutch farms showed if 80% of the urine could be captured, then there could be a 50% reduction in ammonia produced.
With their German colleagues, Matthews and Elliffe worked with 16 calves at the German farm, which operated using an indoor barn system.
First, they demonstrated that most calves could be trained to “hold it”.
If they began to urinate in the wrong place, the scientists would make their collars vibrate. While the vibration didn’t hurt them, most of the calves soon learned to walk a short distance to a latrine pen.
Next, Matthews and Elliffe put the calves in a latrine pen, which was bright green to differentiate it from other pens and rewarded them with a favoured food treat if they urinated there.
“This is how some people train their children – they put them on the toilet, wait for them to pee, then reward them if they do it,” Matthews said.
“Turns out it works with calves too. In very short order, five or 10 urinations for some animals, they demonstrated they understood the connection between the desired behaviour and the reward by going to the feeder as soon as they started urinating.”
The next progression was to increase the distance cows had to walk to the latrine. If “accidents” occurred in another part of the barn, scientists would squirt a little cold water at them. Most of the calves soon learned the ultimate toilet-training skill.
“Very quickly, within 15 to 20 urinations on average, the cows would self-initiate entry to the toilet. This is very exciting because it means they were paying attention to their bladder getting fuller,” he said.
“By the end, three quarters of the animals were doing three-quarters of their urinations in the toilet.”
The calves received only 15 days of training and the majority learned the full set of skills within 20 to 25 urinations, which compares favourably to toilet-training time for three- and four-year-old children.
The next step for Matthews and Elliffe is to bring their research to a New Zealand farming context.
AgResearch did that in a separate but similar experiment in 2019 on a Manawatū farm.
In that study, scientist Luke Cooney looked to see if urination and defecation could be controlled on eight calves in a pasture paddock using a similar type of reward system as Matthews’ study.
These calves were trained over four weeks to associate urination and defecation with a food reward from an automatic feeder near a ‘potty stall’ in an enclosed pen within the paddock.
The calves were then given free access to the paddock and Cooney measured how often the calves went to the toilet to get a reward.
Before training, 1.3% of the calves used the stall and this climbed to 47% post-training.
“That’s a 35%-fold increase. It was really great and gave us some encouragement that potentially cows are capable of potty training,” Cooney said.
“Lindsay’s study has really bolstered that belief that it’s definitely possible.”
However, stall use by the calves fell to 22% by the third day. Cooney believes the calves needed further reinforcement to encourage undesired behaviour post-training.
But it did show it was possible in a paddock setting, he said.
Matthew’s use of the vibrating collars and the water squirts looked to be a good way of reinforcing that behaviour. It also showed strong evidence that calves could anticipate the reward if they were at the feeder.
Cooney is currently seeking further funding on this research. He also knows an engineer interested in making an automated version of the training system capable of dispensing feed out in a paddock.
“What I envision as the end goal for this technology is a kind of cattle portaloo potentially that could be deployed in a paddock that encourages the cows to come over and collect the effluent,” Cooney said.
