Cow Orientation
Cattlemen, dairymen…lend me an ear. I said lend me an ear because it may be that the inner ears of cows plays some role in the direction that they stand. This seems like an item from the Jay Leno Show. Researchers reported last year that most cows and deer tend to orient themselves in a north-south alignment but have now found that power lines can disorient the animals. When the power lines run east-west, that's the way grazing cattle tend to line up according to researchers at a German University. They also found that cows and deer grazing under northeast-southwest or northwest-southeast power lines faced in random directions. We had to confirm these important findings with Dr. Rick Norell, Extension Dairy Specialist with U of I. “There haven’t been a lot of studies that have been done so it’s still open to conjecture but the ones that have been done suggest it’s not an issue.”
