Cattle Stress Part 2

Cattle Stress Part 2

Cattle Stress Part 2. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture.

Ranchers bringing cattle back from summer grazing have been noticing changes in their cattle, and not good ones. They are seeing more illness, less pregnancies and even aggressive behavior. The cause is stress for wolf predation. Oregon State's Reinaldo Cooke.

COOKE: And every time they saw a wolf or heard a wolf howl or smell a wolf that would trigger a stress reaction on them. It would be chronic stress reaction of course because they would see them maybe once a week, once every couple of days. So that would cause a chronic stress.

Cooke and other researchers decided to replicate a wolf encounter to study the cattle's reactions.

COOKE: So we came up with this model based on existing papers with the wildlife that said that just the visual stimuli seeing an animal that resembles a predator can cause a fear reaction. Fear-related stress reaction on animals and the same thing applies to smelling them or hearing them.

They used wolf pelts, recorded howls, wolf urine and German Shepards resembling wolves to get a reaction. As for a solution?

COOKE: I think that's the first step to show that something is actually happening. Having those wolves around is changing the way our livestock behaves and it's changing the way our livestock responds to human contact, having dogs around. Now what to of? That's for future research.

That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.

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