Lee Pitts: The Herd Heard

I’ve always been a very curious fellow. I think it was my curiosity that made me a writer as the poet Alastair Reid wrote, “Only the curious have a tale worth telling.”

One of the things I’ve always been curious about is what sense is it that makes cows run to the feed truck? Can they smell the hay on the truck? Cows do actually have a better sense of smell than humans and that’s saying something because we all know that a cop can smell a donut five miles away and my wife can smell Olive Garden’s Fettuccine Alfredo two counties away.

Speaking of my wife, did you know that women can smell better than men?

I’ve always wondered what makes cows so reluctant to enter a squeeze chute and had always assumed they associated it with pain but I did some research and found that it’s because cows can smell stress in another cow’s urine and this is what makes them balk. I also discovered that butterflies taste with their feet and turtles can breathe through their butts.

In addition to the five senses that humans have, cows have an extra sense. Using a Google satellite scientists looked at the way cows were laying down and found out that they invariably faced north or south along earth’s magnetic field lines. This extra sense is called a sense of magnetic direction!

Being a curious person I have lots of unanswered questions such as, when a Holstein cow laughs does milk come out its nose? I also wonder if the gene in buffalo that makes them paw through snow to get to the grass couldn’t be inserted into a cow’s DNA. But the biggest question I have is what makes cows run to the feed truck?

Why, for example did cows run to the truck when it was full of hay but didn’t run to the same truck when I drove up the dirt road to the house with no hay? At first I thought that they could see the hay on the truck because of their acute sense of sight. After all, vision is the dominant sense in cattle, responsible for 50% of the knowledge they gain from their senses. They have panoramic vision and their only blind spot is directly behind them. That’s why you should never drive cattle from directly behind them but should be off to one side or sweep back and forth.

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