Helping other students and researchers on their animal behavior projects is great fun because you get to learn so much about the animals, yet you don’t have the dread of writing and publishing the scientific paper—a task that somehow takes at least 10x longer than the actual data collection. Here’s one project I helped on in 1999, 2000. The investigators were my major advisor, Dr. Ed Price, his graduate student, Jennipher Harris, and his research assistant, Reid Borgwardt.

With beef cattle, animals spend most of their lives on range and are handled primarily when it’s time for vaccinations and other health-related procedures. Because there’s safety in numbers, cows hang around in groups called herds. These herds are comprised of females and their offspring. Adult males usually hang out away from the female herds.

When females are in heat though, males are welcome. (Hubba hubba). Bulls know when females are in heat because females release chemical signals called pheromones through their urine into the environment. Bulls can detect this pheromone when they deposit the fluid into an area in the roof of their mouth called the vomeronasal organ. This is the face a bull makes (called the flehman response) when it's transferring the chemical to it's vomeronasal organ.

Females also mount each other when they are in heat or close to being in heat. Males can see this from a long distance away.

Cows give birth approximately 9-10 months after conception. Within minutes of giving birth, they bond closely to their calf who is usually up walking within one hour and running within 24 hours. These hungry calves need lots of their mother’s milk to grow but they don’t nurse all day. Rather, they nurse in bouts several times a day. The first bout is soon after they wake up in the morning. Then while their mothers wander across the field to collect food in the form of grass, the youngsters remain in one spot. They’re still protected because a few adult cows stay back to babysit. Occasionally, throughout the day, a calf will moo for it’s mother. It’s mother will call back and then head for it’s calf. Usually soon thereafter, other calves and their mothers will call to each other and before long, the whole herd is nursing.

By 6 months of age calves are still nursing but are getting a large percentage of their nutrients from grazing. They are usually weaned from their mothers abruptly at this age. This is potentially stressful to both mother and calf. In the wild they would self-wean gradually at about 9-10 months of age.

The purpose of this research project was to determine whether there was a difference in stress when calves were weaned across a fenceline so that they could still have contact with their mothers vs. when they were completely separated from their mothers. The study found that the calves that were weaned away from their mothers vocalized more frequently, ate less, and spent much more time walking than the calves weaned with just a fence separating them from their mothers. Calves that were fenceline weaned spent the first several days close to the fence but thereafter rapidly increased their distance from the fence. They were completely weaned within 5 days. Additionally, these calves gained more weight than the regularly-weaned calves. After ten weeks, fenceline calves had gained 31% more weight than the average calf weaned away from its mother.

These findings indicate that fenceline contact between beef calves and cows at weaning reduces the negative effects of weaning on calf behavior and growth rate. Bottom line: Calves that are fenceline weaned are more likely to continue a close-to-normal growth rate and weight gain. So a simple husbandry change can lead to a gib increase in production. Note: We had the luxury of being able to glue numbers onto the calves and cows for identification purposes.