smokerblog

The Secret Life of Cows

According to research done at Cambridge and Bristol University, cows are smarter than we thought. Also, they're gay.

Webster and his colleagues have documented how cows within a herd form smaller friendship groups of between two and four animals with whom they spend most of their time, often grooming and licking each other. They will also dislike other cows and can bear grudges for months or years.

Having grown up on a dairy farm, I have witnessed this kind of behavior. Individual cows can have distinctive personalities (bovialities?). Some are docile, some skittish, some belligerent, etc. They do tend to "hang out" together in small groups and I have seen individual cows who don't seem to like each other.

I can buy the use of terms like "friendship groups" or the idea of cows who hold "grudges," so but here we go:

Dairy cow herds can also be intensely sexual. Webster describes how the cows become excited when one of the herd comes into heat and start trying to mount her. “Cows look calm, but really they are gay nymphomaniacs,” he said.

Oh my. That's taking it too far. In the fifteen years that I've spent working with cows, I've never witnessed any behavior that was "intensely sexual." Yes, cows will mount each other when in heat, but nymphomaniancs? Gay? Not that there's anything wrong with that...