It may sound like a crazy idea, but a new study conducted by Japanese researchers at the University of Kyoto and the Aichi Agricultural Research Center involved painting stripes on cows. Their efforts were based on the fact that biting flies tend not to bite striped animals.
While cows, for example, are constantly pestered by the bugs, zebras are not. That led some agricultural scientists to hypothesize that preventing bug bites is the primary function of a zebra’s stripes. In that case, they figured, painting black and white stripes on other animals might have the same result.
Of course, the scientists knew that just slapping some stripes on wasn’t going to do the trick, so they dug deeper into the exact kinds of coats the biting flies avoid.
It turns out that black animals with white stripes narrower than 5cm or white spots with a diameter of less than 10cm tend not to be bitten.
Sound silly?
Well, it turns out bug bites are serious issues for farmers. Cattle aren’t just inconvenienced by the pests, the bugs affect their behavior as well – they graze less, eat less, and exhibit irritated behavior such as head-throwing and foot-stomping. In other words, they’re uncomfortable and annoyed and it stresses them out.
If you don’t think a stressed-out cow is a big deal, it’s important to know that these behavioral issues can reduce weight in beef cattle as well as milk production in dairy cows.
Even if you’re a vegan, the larger economic impact is worth considering as is the possibility of reducing the amount of pesticides used on farmland. Finding a less toxic way of repelling bugs is a win for everyone.
The scientists noted in their paper on the open-access site PLoS One:
“This may be an alternative environmentally friendly practical method of controlling biting flies without the use of pesticides in animal production.”
In their experiment, researchers painted white stripes on 6 female Japanese black cows with “commercial waterborne white lacquer” (one that fades away in just a few days). And they were very specific about the way they did it:
“The painted stripes were drawn freehand in width of approximately 4–5 cm and were painted on the morning of every observation day. Painting stripes on cows required approximately 5 minutes/individual.”
To see if the colors made a difference, they also had a group of cattle painted with black stripes (photo “b” below) and a control group with no stripes at all (photo “c”).
You might be wondering why cows painted with black stripes. It’s because the researchers wanted to make sure it wasn’t the scent of the lacquer that was chasing away flies.
They needed to know it was the stripes themselves.
You can read more about the experimental design here, but the important thing to note is that the cows were observed by taking a look at any bugs or bug bites on their bodies as well as observing any fly-repelling behaviors such as a head throws, ear beats, leg stomps, skin twitches, or tail-flicks.
And, of course, we wouldn’t be telling you about the research if they didn’t find something interesting.
It turns out that painting white stripes on a cow did significantly reduce the number of pests around them – by 50%!
Those with black stripes (which are barely visible) or no stripes were both pestered at the same rate as they were prior to the experiment. Even being near a white-striped cow didn’t help.
It might sound like a ridiculous experiment, but reducing the number of biting flies cattle are exposed to leads to much happier and more productive cows. The researchers said that “the economic impact of biting flies on the United States cattle production was estimated at $2,211 million per year” (in other words, over $2 BILLION).
Clearly, finding a way to reduce the exposure of cows to these pests is a huge money-saver and far more environmentally friendly than spraying pesticides.
While more research needs to be done on more cows (this was too small a study to be conclusive), it does give us some insight into how we can make things easier for our bovine friends.
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