Sometimes I drive past a field with 50 or more cows and they’re all pointed in the exact same direction. Heads one way, tails the other way.
Other times I drive past a field where the cows are pointed haphazardly in all directions, apparently randomly without any relationship to each other. But I see fields of “aligned” cows frequently enough that the phenomenon must have some explanation. Are they trying to catch the sun at a particular angle?
Could be closer to feeding time, or just time for the herd to move, when they’re facing the same direction. I grew up around cattle but never noticed orientation.
One old tale I heard (herd?) in pilot training was that when it’s windy, cows will point into the wind. An important detail for emergency landings, land into the wind but not into the cows.
Cows will often align themselves along the earth’s magnetic field lines. This is something that ranchers had noticed when viewing herds from the air, and was studied more scientifically after someone noticed cow alignments on google earth.
Many animals have magnetic compasses built into them. In some animals, like homing pigeons, the sense works very well (though it’s not the only sense that homing pigeons use). Many other animals have structures that may allow them to sense magnetic fields, but the animals haven’t demonstrated that they can actually use the sense to any useful degree. Humans have a magnetic compass as well in the form of a concentration of iron in the ethmoid bones of our skull. Exactly how well this sense works is debatable, but the range of debate is somewhere between “works very poorly” to “doesn’t work at all”.
Apprently cows and other herd animas align themselves with the magnetic pole.
I’m not disputing the evidence, but I’m very curious what the evolutionary advantage was. For migratory creatures, I can see it as a way to find north and south, I suppose. But cows?
For migratory creatures, I can see it as a way to find north and south, I suppose. But cows?
Herd animals like cattle, bison, etc. are migratory by nature. If they stayed in one place, they’d overgraze.
Cows are descended from aurochs, which were migratory.
Perhaps this is the reason far side cows car - Google Search
Even for animals that are not strictly migratory, but roam over a large home range, it can still be useful to know direction in order to navigate.
If you’re the poster child for flatulence, facing into the wind helps too.
IIRC, we looked at that paper claiming magnetic alignment before, and concluded that the statistics in it were extremely sketchy. Besides which, farmers have long been observing alignment by wind, and they couldn’t be aligning to both.
Helps for the flatulent cow herself. Now so much for the next cow downwind.
Pro-tip: So cows are ferro-magnetic. Don’t put them into an MRI machine.
I’ve heard the idea suggested that cow alignment is simply one manifestation of cows’ herd mentality. This, of course, is little more than a hypothesis, that doesn’t actually “explain” much about why.
I have heard this also. However, I think herd behavior is the best explanation. Either a leader or an accidental percentage of cows face the same way and they all follow suit.
Alignment with the magnetic pole is questionable, the herd doesn’t always face the same direction that I’ve noticed, but I’ve only spent any time around small herds, so I guess maybe.
Many times they’re just pausing while walking from one field (or portion of a field) to another. I used to watch a herd who lived behind my house graze on the east side in the morning and slowly go to the west side by afternoon and turn and come back in the evening. They did this everyday without fail. If I had passed by it would have appeared they were just standing there facing the same way for no reason.
Cows have ancestors.
Were they migratory?
African or European cows?
My father always told us that when cows lie down, it means
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They are tired.
Yes, this is an example of concensus decision making. Herd animals face a problem when they need to move from one place to another. i.e. to a new grazing spot or a nearby watering hole, or a place with more shade or more sun, etc.
If they leave too soon some won’t get enough of whatever is present at the place they are currently that brought them there. If they leave too late some may get dehydrated or weak waitng around in a place that has nothing left to exploit as others continue to much away on remaining resources nearby. If they don’t move as a group some will be left vulnerable to predators. They can’t just fan out and find spots suitable to their individual tastes/needs as their safety is based on being part of the herd. There is no alpha cow that says “OK, I’ve decided - it’s time to go, and we’re going this way, at this speed, to do this activity”. They are all voting by pointing a certain direction at a given time and will go that way as a herd when the majority agree.
This may not be the only explanation for why a group of herd animals happen to be aligning themselves the same way at the same time but it is definitely one of them.
