Researchers Toilet-Trained Cows In Hopes of Reducing Their Greenhouse Gas Emissions (gizmodo.com) 78
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Researchers in Germany recently demonstrated that cattle can be toilet trained to reduce some of their climate impact. By having the young cows pee in latrines made of turf, the team of experts in animal behavior and agricultural science stopped the natural production of nitrous oxide from the cow's urine. Cows are notorious for their contributions to greenhouse gas emissions in large-scale farming; the animals belch (and to a lesser extent, fart) methane, and their urine and poop combine to produce ammonia, which isn't a greenhouse gas itself but is converted into nitrous oxide by microbes in the soil. The team trained nearly a dozen calves to urinate in a makeshift latrine, nicknamed the MooLoo, thereby stopping the urine from becoming part of the problem. The research was published on Monday in Current Biology.
Training the cows was a fairly simple process on paper. First, the scientists penned 16 of the animals into the latrine area. When the cows urinated, they were given food or sugar water, tacit endorsements of their decisions. The next step was teaching them not to pee in the pasture, which the team did by implementing an unpleasant stimulus whenever they did so. That stimulus was originally a loud noise, but when the researchers realized the animals didn't mind it much, they swapped it out for spraying the cows with water, a relatively harmless message of "bad cow." The team found that the cows' ability to hold it and go in the latrine was equivalent to a child's ability with the toilet -- even superior to that of young children. [The team] hopes to bring the latrines to other sites and increase the number of potty-trained cows. "To do this, we must first automate the whole training procedure and adapt it to the conditions on the farm," he told Gizmodo in an email. "We want to tackle this in a follow-up project." The report notes there are a couple of limitations with this effort. "First, not all of the cows could be potty-trained. Only 10 of the 16 calves quickly learned to pee in the proper place and could routinely reproduce that action," reports Gizmodo. "That's trouble for anyone trying to scale up the practice (there are more than 1 billion cows on Earth). Second, the experiment didn't cover defecation, and cow poop also contains ammonia. There's also still the major problem of methane, a greenhouse gas 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide, tied to cows burps and farts."
Training the cows was a fairly simple process on paper. First, the scientists penned 16 of the animals into the latrine area. When the cows urinated, they were given food or sugar water, tacit endorsements of their decisions. The next step was teaching them not to pee in the pasture, which the team did by implementing an unpleasant stimulus whenever they did so. That stimulus was originally a loud noise, but when the researchers realized the animals didn't mind it much, they swapped it out for spraying the cows with water, a relatively harmless message of "bad cow." The team found that the cows' ability to hold it and go in the latrine was equivalent to a child's ability with the toilet -- even superior to that of young children. [The team] hopes to bring the latrines to other sites and increase the number of potty-trained cows. "To do this, we must first automate the whole training procedure and adapt it to the conditions on the farm," he told Gizmodo in an email. "We want to tackle this in a follow-up project." The report notes there are a couple of limitations with this effort. "First, not all of the cows could be potty-trained. Only 10 of the 16 calves quickly learned to pee in the proper place and could routinely reproduce that action," reports Gizmodo. "That's trouble for anyone trying to scale up the practice (there are more than 1 billion cows on Earth). Second, the experiment didn't cover defecation, and cow poop also contains ammonia. There's also still the major problem of methane, a greenhouse gas 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide, tied to cows burps and farts."
It goes without saying... (Score:5, Funny)
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That's what I thought too, until I read the article and saw that it was piss.
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No they are taking the piss. Didn't you read the article?
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And it seems udderly pointless, since it's not bullshit that generates the greenhouse gases, it's burps. Cows belch a lot and that is full of the greenhouse gas methane.
Perhaps of toilet trained cows, we should have put methane-capturing gas masks on cows.
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"Cows belch a lot and that is full of the greenhouse gas methane."
Exactly! The should forbid cows with 4 stomachs, 1 is enough for everybody.
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"That's what I thought too, until I read the article and saw that it was piss."
Yes, they collect piss. The Romans already did that, to wash their clothes.
People were piss-poor those times.
Re: It goes without saying... (Score:2)
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Australian Cattleman (Score:2)
Yeh.. Nahhh..
Space Applications (Score:3)
Without this fantastic research, we may have finally solved the riddles of interplanetary exploration. This opens up the possibility that man and moo can now comfortably travel the stars together.
First, this increases the choices of space food available, so that it isn't only impossible burgers for the rest of time.
Second, there will be an unlimited supply of methane so that no one ever gets stuck on an asteroid.
Third, there will be enough ammonia to run the cooling system forever.
Mooniverse, look out now!
--
It is strange that only extraordinary men make the discoveries, which later appear so easy and simple. - Georg C. Lichtenberg
doesnt always work (Score:2)
A long time friend of mine married a cow. She still wets the couch, I mean why get up.
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Gives "sleeping on the wet spot" a whole new context...
Ig nobel prize for 2021 (Score:2)
Nomination!
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Top contender I've seen so far.
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You're a bit late. But maybe 2022 may be possible. The Biology prize this year went to someone for analyzing variations in purring, chirping, chattering, trilling, tweedling, murmuring, meowing, moaning, squeaking, hissing, yowling, howling, growling, and other modes of cat–human communication. https://www.improbable.com/202... [improbable.com]
BBQ? (Re:Smart enough to use the toilet) (Score:5, Interesting)
But dumb enough to eat...
I see the irony, but take one a look and taste at a steak and explain to me how there is any better use for cows than grilling and eating...
I'm sure someone might argue for BBQ.
Megafauna like cattle are vital to fighting the encroachment of deserts onto fertile lands. This was discovered by experimentation.
https://www.ted.com/talks/alla... [ted.com]
Serious people making serious decisions to look at the problem are finding that we need to have more grazing animals shitting and pissing on the land. I'm afraid to even read more than the summary on this because this just sounds too ridiculous. Wild grasslands exist because grazing animals were there to eat the grass, stir up the earth with their hooves, piss and shit on the ground, which would fertilize and spread seeds. Humans can aid this process with herding the animals along, mechanization, and modern farming and ranching techniques. If global warming concerns these assholes then they need to talk to real scientists doing real science.
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I agree completely. There seems to be some good benefits to having grazing animals in certain locations. But our current cattle industry has very little to do with cattle grazing in natural and beneficial ways and numbers. At any given point of time the total weight of live cattle in the US, supplying both dairy and meat markets, is approximately equal to the weight of humans in the US (circa 50-60 billion pounds). At the end of the day, having cattle graze in a beneficial and sustainable way is going to
The USA prairie soil is 25m thick ... (Score:3)
in many places because of grazing herds of bison. Sustainable and regenerative agriculture with traditional meats is possible. You need predators to really make limited bison ranges sustainable though i.e. wolves in USA Yellowstone National Park.
I'm mostly vegetarian now, was vegan for a few years.
If I had better discipline I'd probably be vegan all the way. More and more studies show it's ecowise and also it seems even insects are showing communication skills, face recognition and so .... plants too ... so
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I see the irony, but take one a look and taste at a steak and explain to me how there is any better use for cows than grilling and eating...
Arguable, considering the large number of dairy products that are derived from cows milk. For your average cheeseburger, the cheese might be more indispensable than the actual burger, for example. Of course, tastes vary. Personally I think there are a number of good reasons to develop good meat alternatives. That includes plant-based meat substitutes. At the very least, however, those have to be made more healthy by reducing the salt content. It also includes vat grown meats. If we can develop meat substitu
Re: Smart enough to use the toilet (Score:2)
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That's why they can't be "returned" to the wild, because they don't really belong there. I know. They do exist now, however so they are still technically something that conservationists may care about preserving. So we do end up with the situation where we might protect them to the point of extinction.
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Mooot point (Score:5, Funny)
This is udderly ridiculous! They are cowtowing to Big Dairy, milking the publicity. It's a cowspiracy worth making hay about.
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Loons blame cows for global warming (Score:2)
What the actual fuck? Cow farts are now destroying the world?
I think the real concern here is that cows are being fed shit that they were never meant to eat, causing their digestive systems to act up on a constant basis, in order to maximize how much can be exploited out of them before they are (mercifully, after a long miserable captive life in cramped conditions) slaughtered and further exploited after death.
I also think that this blame shifting on cows is really attention shifting away from the
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What the actual fuck? Cow farts are now destroying the world?
Actually cow burps are more responsible. But yes, farts as well.
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Consider that for millions of years there have been ruminates populations that far exceed the total population of cattle today. The North American Bison once roamed North American in herds on the orders of millions of head before the mid 1800's. Also consider all the other ruminates that once had populations far in excess of today's cows.
And yet the green house gas emissions from all those ruminates never caused any problems for the environment before.
So, what changed?
Most of the beef cattle in America a
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Consider that for millions of years there have been ruminates populations that far exceed the total population of cattle today.
Nope. The current population of ruminants basically dominates anything that has existed before.
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Consider that for millions of years there have been ruminates populations that far exceed the total population of cattle today.
No. This is nonsense.
https://xkcd.com/1338/ [xkcd.com]
all those ruminates never caused any problems for the environment before.
Ruminants have always burped methane. There is nothing new about it.
Switch them back to a normal grass fed diet and most of the problem with green house gas emissions from cows goes away.
Bullcrap. Cows produce the most methane when grazing on pasture.
Re: Loons blame cows for global warming (Score:3)
Theyâ(TM)re being fed food they didnâ(TM)t originally live on. They donâ(TM)t survive off of grasses. Corn comes from a grass, but itâ(TM)s higher in sugars.
And then thereâ(TM)s all of the weird stuff we feed them (processed food from factories that got damaged or didnâ(TM)t meet standards, so gummi bears and such)
And there are way more of them than would survive on their own without human intervention
But people are saying that itâ(TM)s the belches, and the pee isn
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Re: Loons blame cows for global warming (Score:2)
I bet the meat will taste a lot better too if they were fed properly and not stuffed shoulder to shoulder all their lives.
But clearly quantity wins out over quality when it comes to profiting from meat production, both in the way the animals are treated and the product they are turned into. :-\
Re:Loons blame cows for global warming (Score:4, Insightful)
What the actual fuck? Cow farts are now destroying the world?
Burps more than farts. But, yes, cows cause about 14% of global warming.
cows are being fed shit that they were never meant to eat
No, that has little to do with it. Cows burp the most methane when grazing on pasture.
attention shifting away from the abuse these animals go through all of their life in "factory farms".
That makes no sense.
Why would the beef industry distract people from factory farms by ALSO blaming their industry for global warming?
It gives people yet another reason not to eat beef.
Chicken and pork are produced with much less GHG emissions than beef. Tofu is even better.
Re: Loons blame cows for global warming (Score:2)
Re: Loons blame cows for global warming (Score:2)
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It's not so much the farts, it's the outgassing from cow manure after it's left the cow. Hence why you can reduce it by toilet training the cows. You do have something of a point about silage and other things cows are fed. In theory the practice of feeding them ground up cows has mostly been stopped, but I'm not completely sure. That should have obviously been a recipe for disaster right from the start.
Re:Loons blame cows for global warming (Score:4, Informative)
What the actual fuck? Cow farts are now destroying the world?
Yeah science is stupid, we should go with angry opinions.
Well except your stupid addition of "destroying the world" in order to discrete the other position by falsely painting it as extreme.
Cows use methanogenic bacteria to digest cellulose. All ruminants do including wild ones on completely natural diets.
Re: Loons blame cows for global warming (Score:2)
That's just a little bit (Score:2)
The Big part is to reduce the meat and milk consumption to lower levels.
And make better use of what remains.
Whatever happened to Seaweed? (Score:5, Interesting)
Whatever happened to that?
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Re:Whatever happened to Seaweed? (Score:5, Informative)
The seaweed was for methane production, this article is about nitrous oxides.
It wasn't covered up; the initial study was in 2014; the long term study finished this year. That's important, because the initial study (Abstract mentions 72 hours) suggested 'up to 99%' reduction, while the long term study (147 weeks) is saying 'up to 80%', still huge, mentions no distinguishable taste difference, and it will change the food we feed cows. Considering the first thing that pops up when searching "cow" and "seaweed" is a dozen articles on it, I don't think anything has been covered up. Farmers don't just switch like a lightbulb when a study comes out; they need to know long term effects on their animals. Need to know which seaweed, at when concentration is healthy, a lot of things.
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Re:Whatever happened to Seaweed? (Score:4, Informative)
Re: Whatever happened to Seaweed? (Score:3)
Topsoil viability, Nitrogen fixation (Score:2)
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Ok, you capture the pee? Now what do you do with it?
Use it as fertilizer, obviously.
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Bovinist (Score:1)
Always blaming cows, as if they are the only source of these emissions. *All* ruminants belch methane, yet you don't see headlines clamouring for the reduction in, say, sheep numbers (there's more than a billion of them as well)...
Re: Bovinist (Score:2)
Buffalo Bill - saviour of the planet (Score:2)
Carbon neutral (Score:3)
Re:Carbon neutral (Score:5, Informative)
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Most cows do see grass though. Not because of any virtuous effort but because it is free whereas those other feed sources are expensive. Also neither that nor most anything else at your typical American farm is done with fossil fuels. Most farm equipment and vehicles are converted to ethanol. Again, not to be
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Most cows do see grass though. Not because of any virtuous effort but because it is free whereas those other feed sources are expensive.
https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]. Not used so much in Europe.
Also neither that nor most anything else at your typical American farm is done with fossil fuels. Most farm equipment and vehicles are converted to ethanol.
Again, it's dependent on region - in Europe it wouldn't be ethanol.
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"Again, it's dependent on region - in Europe it wouldn't be ethanol."
Why is that? Is it outlawed (or heavily restricted) for some reason? I was under the impression that petroleum products were ridiculously overpriced in Europe in order to keep the population packed together in
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Why is that? Is it outlawed (or heavily restricted) for some reason? I was under the impression that petroleum products were ridiculously overpriced
For agricultural use diesel in the UK is zero-rated for duties, but is coloured and using it for domestic vehicles is outlawed. Other schemes operate across Europe. There aren't the large areas devoted to maize or subsidies for it to be converted to ethanol.
in Europe in order to keep the population packed together in the cities and dependent on the social infrastructure.
What a weird statement. Throughout the world, irrespective of fuel costs, the trend is towards urbanisation.
ridiculously overpriced
It's much closer to a price that internalises, into the fuel cost, the externality costs. As such, you could argue it allows the market to work on
oversimplification (Score:2)
Methane has Carbon in it, so it's "neutral" in a embarrassingly simplistic way...
Burning cows and their food into carbon is fine (no methane) as long as you don't do this at a rate faster than the earth can transform that carbon back into plants and cows again! Even if the exchange was "neutral" you'd have to maintain a balance in the cycle to not run into problems. I can use 1TB of RAM and it's all "neutral" and I never run out... But if I use that all at once, it's slow as hell as VM thrashes me so much
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No cows are not carbon neutral in the environmental sense of the word. They emit methane which then stays in the atmosphere contributing to global warming by an order of magnitude more that CO2 for several years before the gas breaks down and would be reabsorbed by the plants.
Over a really long term they are carbon neutral, but they contribute a shitton to global warming in the process.
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Cows are carbon neutral. The carbon they release is entirely from the carbon they consume.
Digesting grass (a solid) and producing methane (a gas) is not carbon neutral, in terms of atmospheric carbon. Your argument could equally apply to a coal-fired power station.
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Dude WTF happened, you used to be first post on all the articles! Are you feeling okay?
Noble Effort but Poor Summary (Score:2)
Someone just reading this story without having followed the related blow-by-blow over time would likely get the inaccurate impression that cows were bad. The net outcome of these various looks into the ecological impact of various solutions to the food problem actually shows that anything we did instead of raising cows would actually be more harmful, especially
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They pan them for the solution not being all encompassing and perfect. That really isn't cool, it is more solution than the author has come up with. Someone just reading this story without having followed the related blow-by-blow over time would likely get the inaccurate impression that cows were bad. The net outcome of these various looks into the ecological impact of various solutions to the food problem actually shows that anything we did instead of raising cows would actually be more harmful, especially in terms of water usage and in most cases reduce ability to feed everyone. That is pretty significant since we fall drastically short of being able to feed the human population globally as it is.
Indeed. Cows eat food that contains Carbon. During the digestion process, they convert some of that carbon into Methane whether via anal gas or burping, the carbon comes back out. Comes back out in their manure as well. Some is incorporateed into their bodiies as well. If the vegetable matter they were eating just decayed, the carbon would return through the atmosphere via rotting or oxidization,
If Cows were eliminated, same difference.
Diets high in vegetable matter will produce methane and Carbon emis
More proof (Score:3)
More proof that we need fewer "researchers."
Unless (Score:3)
Although a Cow in an alchemists hat? How cool would that be?
If we re-lease already sequestered Carbon or methane in the process of raising cows, yes. But that is Carbon that would be re-released anyhow.
Seriously AGW is real. But we aren't going to combat it this way.
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of global warming. My pet peeve are claims of "zero-emissions" -- that is equivalent to a perpetual motion machine! Everything takes mass and energy, and everything results in mass and energy. Are they telling us they have a process where NOTHING, no mass and no energy is left behind including the mechanisms to do these zero-emission productions?
And that's the pity. The issue of energy retention is real. I've seen it, 5th grade science fair students have seen and understand it.
But too many people that don't know much about physics/science are talkin' shite, to quote our GB friends.
About the only way to have cows be negative Carbon would be to collect their farts and manure, then bury it far underground in sealed containers. Which would be weird. And offset by whatever Greenhouse emissions are made during the sequestering process.
And the r