Cows ‘potty-trained’ in experiment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions

Calves taught to use toilet area with rewards and mild punishments

Hannah Devlin Science correspondent Mon 13 Sep 2021 11.00 EDT

Waste from cattle farms often contaminates soil and waterways and contributes to greenhouse gas emissions and the acidification of soil. For this reason, toilet-training cattle has long been viewed as desirable, but several previous attempts have been unsuccessful.

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

THE GERMAN HOLSTEIN PANOPTICON

“Cattle, like many other animals, are quite clever and they 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 be able to learn how to use a toilet?”

The calves were trained via a system of rewards and mild punishments...after about 15 training sessions, 11 out of the 16 calves in the experiment had been successfully toilet-trained, according to the study published in the journal Current Biology...

Langbein said a future ambition would be to teach cows to also defecate in a toilet area.

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