I would dislike giving birth and lactating annually, but one thing that appeals about being a dairy cow is lying down for 10-14 hours a day. I don’t need a plush mattress. But mud? No, thanks. And bare dirt or mud is sometimes the only resting surface available to cows during winter in places where pasture growth doesn’t keep up with their appetite.
But perhaps they don’t mind mud. To find out, we can’t get inside a cow’s brain, but we can use a scientific method.
All farmers know cattle recline to sleep, rest and chew cud, but it’s not obvious how long they lie for. So scientists have watched or videoed them around the clock, settling on lying times of 10-14 hours.
One type of experiment prevents cows from lying, or limits their lying time. When they are then allowed to lie unhampered, they do so for longer than usual, as if to catch up. If they have also been prevented from eating, they choose to lie more rather than eat; the urge to lie outweighs even eating.
This and other experiments show cows’ lying need is inelastic, a word economists use to describe how shoppers continue to buy items they deem essential, such as bread, even when the price soars. Animals’ currency is time and energy, and restricting access to a resource so they are forced to prioritise can reveal how much they value it.
AgResearch and DairyNZ scientists monitored cows’ lying, ruminating and eating for a month in an intensive winter grazing system in 2020. Each day, a new strip of paddock planted only with fodder beet or kale was opened up. The crops got eaten, leaving bare soil. It rained.
One day after the heaviest rainfall, the cows lay for just 2.5 hours on average, and a third of the cows in two of the four paddocks stood for 24 hours. “Lying time decreased with deteriorating paddock-soil conditions, especially with increasing surface water pooling,” the scientists wrote. Another study, from the University of California, Davis, concluded that, “Cattle spent less time lying down in muddier conditions, especially during the first day, when they spent only 4.7 hours lying down on the muddiest surface compared to 12.3 hours on dry soil.”
After some days in muddy conditions, cows will lie for longer. Veterinarian Helen Beattie, managing director of Veterinarians for Animal Welfare Aotearoa, says that eventually cows simply have to lie down whether the surface is acceptable to them or not. “They get exhausted. Even you and I would have to sit in our own effluent eventually. All animals need to lie down, whether it’s an elephant, a gazelle, cattle or sheep.”
There’s less research on sheep lying. Last month, images of Southland sheep fenced into mud appeared in the media, as they do each winter for cattle. Some commenters reckoned there was no problem because the animals were in good physical condition. But that’s not the same as having good welfare, says Mark Fisher, former manager of a Ministry for Primary Industries’ animal welfare team and author of the book Animal Welfare Science, Husbandry and Ethics. “You can still suffer with good body condition. In really good body condition you can withstand more, but you still feel it and feel miserable.”
Beattie says no one has ever been prosecuted for keeping animals on mud. In 2019, she called for, and was part of, the Winter Grazing Taskforce. A pan-agrisector Winter Grazing Action Group followed, which issued expected outcomes for animal welfare, including giving birth in the right environment and access to clean drinking water.
But no new legislation has backed that up. Changes are proposed for the Dairy Cattle Code of Welfare, requiring that intensively winter-grazed animals have access to a well-drained lying space, clean drinking water and a dry place to calve. To each, DairyNZ’s submission stated “No”.
