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Researchers Toilet-Trained Cows In Hopes of Reducing Their Greenhouse Gas Emissions (gizmodo.com) 78

Posted by BeauHD from the doesn't-hurt-to-try dept.
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."
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Researchers Toilet-Trained Cows In Hopes of Reducing Their Greenhouse Gas Emissions More

Researchers Toilet-Trained Cows In Hopes of Reducing Their Greenhouse Gas Emissions

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  • It goes without saying... (Score:5, Funny)

    by gosso920 ( 6330142 ) on Monday September 13, 2021 @10:43PM (#61794283)
    This story sounds like a bunch of bullshit.

  • Yeh.. Nahhh..

  • Space Applications (Score:3)

    by Arzaboa ( 2804779 ) on Monday September 13, 2021 @11:08PM (#61794315)

    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

  • A long time friend of mine married a cow. She still wets the couch, I mean why get up.

  • Mooot point (Score:5, Funny)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Monday September 13, 2021 @11:52PM (#61794413) Journal

    This is udderly ridiculous! They are cowtowing to Big Dairy, milking the publicity. It's a cowspiracy worth making hay about.

  • 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

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Cyberax ( 705495 )

      What the actual fuck? Cow farts are now destroying the world?

      Actually cow burps are more responsible. But yes, farts as well.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by PinkyGigglebrain ( 730753 )

        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

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Cyberax ( 705495 )

          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.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 )

          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.

        • 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

        • Ruminants (n), not ruminates (vi).
        • What really changed? People, billions of them. If we really want to cut CO2, we'd start by eliminating incentives to have kids. Worldwide. How about a kid tax instead of a carbon tax?

        • 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)

      by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @01:12AM (#61794547)

      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.

      • If cows are responsible for 14% of global warming, shouldn't we rather eat them instead of becoming vegetarians? I mean those people are so aware of the problem but entirely unwilling to help solve it...
      • More seriously, did the total cattle population grow by so much, that the methane now is 14% of all agw? Because if the cattle numbers didn't increase, the methane they create is constant per year, and the breakdown is also constant (10 years half life?), so effective it's a static balance iff the life stock number is stable.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tragedy ( 27079 )

      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)

      by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @05:22AM (#61794909) Journal

      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.

    • They feed them grain instead of grass. Whats worse is when vegans try to use this example to force veganism on everyone else. Do you know what it takes, in absence of actual meat, to get your full profile of amino acids? You must consume both grains, and legumes. BOTH are notorious for creating methane in humans. So lets blame the farting cow, and instead create 4 BILLION constantly farting humans. That will fix everything.

  • 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)

    by schweini ( 607711 ) on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @01:59AM (#61794653)
    Years ago, someone reported that you can sinificantly reduce cow's greenhouse emissions simply by feeding them a bit of seaweed or something like that. It seemd super easy and effective and cheap.
    Whatever happened to that?
    • Yea, I remember this too, but apparently this was completely suppressed and covered up... You only had to add little bits of seaweed to their current food too, but my guess is the world is more corrupt than any of us could ever imagine and the Governments don't actually want a solution to global warming for whatever reason. Plenty of speculation as to why, but your guess is as good as mine...

      • Re:Whatever happened to Seaweed? (Score:5, Informative)

        by SlideWRX ( 660190 ) on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @07:06AM (#61795069)

        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.

    • Yeah, that sounds like a good idea. Not sure if cows like seaweed - they had no problem eating the dead cows though. Remember remember the mad cow disease?

    • Re:Whatever happened to Seaweed? (Score:4, Informative)

      by RobinH ( 124750 ) on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @06:59AM (#61795059) Homepage
      It looks like this is still being actively studied and shows a lot of promise [ucdavis.edu]. The article says they were testing whether or not it changed the flavor of the beef (apparently not).
    • Grass fed beef does not have the methane problems, and the meat is leaner, healthier, and tasted way better than its grain fed counterpart.
  • Cow piss and patties are powerful fertilizers, that the farmer does not have to buy. In a lot of marginal farmland, topsoil can be barely 1cm thick. The urine fertilizes the ground with grass or subclover, stopping the soil blowing away. Ever seen a duststorm 1000miles away drop red soil on you vehicle/house. That urine then causes grass, which absorbs nasty carbon, and releasing pure oxygen. Ok, you capture the pee? Now what do you do with it? Meanwhile in the UK, farmers are replanting hedgerows, to rees

  • 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)...

    • Id like to see an anti vegan campaign. No more grains. No more beans. 4 billion methane farting humans is destroying the planet I tell ya.
  • It is a good thing we killed and ate all the buffaloes. They would have ruined the planet.

  • Carbon neutral (Score:3)

    by The Evil Atheist ( 2484676 ) on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @05:41AM (#61794941)
    Cows are carbon neutral. The carbon they release is entirely from the carbon they consume. Stop wasting time on nonsense.

    • Re:Carbon neutral (Score:5, Informative)

      by q_e_t ( 5104099 ) on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @06:59AM (#61795057)
      From TFS and TFA, the gas at issue is nitrous oxide, not CO2. In any case, plants take in CO2, cows eat it, then fart out methane which is more short lived but more potent than CO2. And also, the only inputs to raising cows aren't grass and air, but also shelter, warmth, vets, feed, distribution of feed, and potentially fertiliser to produce that, which have a carbon input. Many cows sadly never see a blade of grass and the feed is hauled to them using fossil fuels and made from crops that required fertiliser and irrigation.
      • All true. But so far any alternative that has been well explored is worse than the cows when you consider that full picture which also needs to include the highly limited resource which is fresh water.

        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

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by q_e_t ( 5104099 )

          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.

          • Interesting. I wouldn't have expected European beef production to be particularly notable but if you aggregate the entire EU it does come in third globally. https://beef2live.com/story-world-beef-production-ranking-countries-0-106885

            "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

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by q_e_t ( 5104099 )

              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

    • 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

    • 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.

    • 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.

  • 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

    • 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)

    by groobly ( 6155920 ) on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @11:33AM (#61796103)

    More proof that we need fewer "researchers."

  • Unless (Score:3)

    by Ol Olsoc ( 1175323 ) on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @12:02PM (#61796169)
    Unless cows are transmuting other elements into Methane and CO2, they are carbon neutral.

    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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