Scientists train cows to go to the toilet to help clean up our planet

This story was originally published by The Guardian and appears here as part of the Climate Table collaboration.

A herd of cows has been “potty trained” in an experiment that scientists say could pave the way for more environmentally friendly farms.

Waste from livestock farms often pollutes soil and waterways and contributes to greenhouse gas emissions and soil acidification. For this reason, cattle have long been considered desirable for toilet training, but several previous attempts have been unsuccessful.

In the latest study, the scientists tested a method they called the MooLoo approach to teaching calves to use a toilet area in their barn, meaning that urine could be collected and treated.

“Cattle, like many other animals, are quite intelligent and can learn a lot,” said Jan Langbein, an animal psychologist at the Research Institute for Farm Animal Biology (FBN) in Germany. “Why shouldn’t they learn to use the bathroom?”

The calves were trained using a system of rewards and mild punishments. When they urinated in the assigned area, they were given a sweet drink or some mashed barley, and when they relieved themselves elsewhere, they were surprised by a small burst of water from above.

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Within a few weeks, after about 15 training sessions, 11 of the 16 calves in the experiment had successfully potty trained, according to the study published in the journal. Current biology. The five calves that weren’t reliably trained probably just needed more time to master the skill, the authors suggested. Langbein said a future ambition would be to teach cows to defecate in a bathing area as well.

The team is now working to create an automated system that could be used to train calves with almost no farmer intervention. “We want to develop some kind of sensor technology, which is all inclusive,” Langbein said. He said his hope was that “in a few years, all the cows will go to the bathroom.”

The ammonia produced in cow urine does not contribute directly to the climate crisis, but when it leaks into the ground, microbes convert it into nitrous oxide, which is the third most important greenhouse gas after methane and carbon dioxide. Agriculture is the largest source of ammonia emissions, with livestock accounting for more than half of that contribution.

According to Langbein, initial estimates suggest that if 80 percent of livestock urine were collected from a barn, ammonia emissions would be cut by more than half.