Private Life of Cows, Wednesday 8pm, BBC Two
Posted by Stewart Turner
Are cows really “one of the most successful species on the planet”? If you define success in terms of being escorted down to the abattoir at the age of six months or having your teats squeezed dry to make our Coco Pops more palatable, presenter Jimmy Doherty probably had a point.
But Jimmy didn’t stop there, even claiming we have a “special relationship” with our bovine friends. I’m not convinced: We give them a decrepit old shed, an occasional change of hay and an electric fence; they give us a few gallons of milk and a couple of kilos of sirloin in return. It all seems slightly one-sided.
Perhaps not for much longer. The Private Life of Cows revealed a hitherto unknown intelligence that suggested the bovine population might only be a few decades away from escaping their chains and mounting an uprising. To prove this, affable Jimmy ran through a series of experiments to reveal just how clever cows really are.
First he taught them to ring a bell to ask for food in a replication of Pavlov’s famous experiments with drooling dogs. The cows picked it up in no time – although dogs aren’t really the sharpest tools in the box, it has to be said. Then Jimmy revealed that dairy cows start oozing out pints of gold top at the merest sound of the machinery farmers use to extract it. Which really doesn’t seem that clever to me, but there you go.
And so it continued… we met a bunch of cows in Northumberland led by a dominant male who has his pick of the ladies, and found out that cows are fertile once every three weeks – as demonstrated by a rampant bull named Earl frothing at the mouth and sniffing around the herd to find a suitor. The experiments came thick and fast, but it was never really clear what the point of all this was.
I don’t doubt that if you dedicated enough time to it you could teach a cow to play fetch, but you know, most farmers simply don’t have the time. Similarly, lock a cow in a room with a typewriter and eventually it’d come up with a pitch for a pseudo-scientific Jimmy Doherty documentary.
Are cows really “one of the most successful species on the planet”? If you define success in terms of being escorted down to the abattoir at the age of six months or having your teats squeezed dry to make our Coco Pops more palatable, presenter Jimmy Doherty probably had a point.
But Jimmy didn’t stop there, even claiming we have a “special relationship” with our bovine friends. I’m not convinced: We give them a decrepit old shed, an occasional change of hay and an electric fence; they give us a few gallons of milk and a couple of kilos of sirloin in return. It all seems slightly one-sided.
Perhaps not for much longer. The Private Life of Cows revealed a hitherto unknown intelligence that suggested the bovine population might only be a few decades away from escaping their chains and mounting an uprising. To prove this, affable Jimmy ran through a series of experiments to reveal just how clever cows really are.
First he taught them to ring a bell to ask for food in a replication of Pavlov’s famous experiments with drooling dogs. The cows picked it up in no time – although dogs aren’t really the sharpest tools in the box, it has to be said. Then Jimmy revealed that dairy cows start oozing out pints of gold top at the merest sound of the machinery farmers use to extract it. Which really doesn’t seem that clever to me, but there you go.
And so it continued… we met a bunch of cows in Northumberland led by a dominant male who has his pick of the ladies, and found out that cows are fertile once every three weeks – as demonstrated by a rampant bull named Earl frothing at the mouth and sniffing around the herd to find a suitor. The experiments came thick and fast, but it was never really clear what the point of all this was.
I don’t doubt that if you dedicated enough time to it you could teach a cow to play fetch, but you know, most farmers simply don’t have the time. Similarly, lock a cow in a room with a typewriter and eventually it’d come up with a pitch for a pseudo-scientific Jimmy Doherty documentary.
Comments
Post a Comment