Toilet training cows - an answer to reducing greenhouse gases?

Auckland University affiliated researchers have successfully demonstrated that cows can be toilet trained with the idea of helping to reduce water contamination and greenhouse gas emissions.

Cow urine is high in nitrogen, releasing nitrate and nitrous oxide as it breaks down in the soil. If that nitrate leaches into lakes and rivers it causes pollution and contributes to excessive growth of weeds and algae.

A calf enters the latrine voluntarily. Photo credit: Research Institute for Farm Animal Biology.

Nitrous oxide accounts for 12 percent of New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions - and much of it comes from the agricultural sector.

But Lindsay Matthews and Douglas Elliffe say if cows were toilet trained - in the same way we train toddlers - nitrogen could be captured and dealt with before that happens.

“We’ve shown proof of concept that we can train cows and train them easily,” says Elliffe, a University of Auckland professor psychology. “Cattle urine is a major cause of our nitrogen problem. Any reduction in that would make a difference.”

“People’s reaction is ‘crazy scientists’, but actually the building blocks are there,” says Matthews, an honorary academic at the university and director of an independent research company. “Cows have bigger urinations when they wake up in the morning, which demonstrates they have the ability to withhold urination. There’s nothing in their neurophysiology that radically differentiates them from animals, such as horses, monkeys and cats, that show latrine behaviour.”

The pair’s research has been published in the scientific journal Current Biology, and will be profiled in an upcoming issue of Science.

The concept for the research stemmed from a radio interview about the environmental impact of cattle excretion in 2007. The interviewer joked that Matthews should try to toilet train cows, and that got him thinking.

It took another eight years before coming to fruition but in 2015, working with calves from the Federal Research Institute for Animal Health in Germany, Matthews and Elliffe proved that most of them could be trained to “hold it in”. If they began to urinate in the wrong place, the scientists would make their collars vibrate. While the vibration didn’t hurt them, most of the calves soon learned to walk a short distance to a latrine pen. The pen was bright green to differentiate it from other pens, and the calves were rewarded with a food treat if they urinated there.

“This is how some people train their children - they put them on the toilet, wait for them to pee, then reward them if they do it,” Matthews says. “Turns out it works with calves too. In very short order, five or ten urinations for some animals, they demonstrated they understood the connection between the desired behaviour and the reward by going to the feeder as soon as they started urinating.

“Very quickly the cows would self-initiate entry to the toilet. This is very exciting because it means they were paying attention to their bladder getting fuller. By the end, three-quarters of the animals were doing three-quarters of their urinations in the toilet”

Exiting the latrine. Photo credit: Research Institute for Farm Animal Biology.

The next step for Matthews and Elliffe is to being their research to the New Zealand context. In the Northern Hemisphere, where they carried out the research, cows spend much of their time in barns, whereas here they’re outdoors. And while the researchers accept this makes toilet training more of a challenge they believe there are ways round it, including installing outdoor latrines.

Even if these changes result in a lower success rate, reducing urine patches would have significant environmental benefits, they say.

The pair have met with representatives of the New Zealand dairy industry, who they say are interested in the research as a potential way of avoiding herd reductions that may otherwise be necessary to meet emissions targets.