You Want Smart? Calves Can Be Potty Trained

Last week, I wrote about squirrel smarts. So while we're on the subject...

Everyone knows cattle are pretty dumb, right? Ranchers raise them, slaughter them, and people eat them. We don't give much thought to their intelligence.

It turns out that calves can be potty trained with about the same quickness as potty training a puppy. (They didn't try it with adult cattle. But we all know that potty training is best done young!)

As reported by Scott Simon on NPR https://www.npr.org/2021/09/18/1038533121/with-a-little-sweet-encouragement-calves-prove-cows-can-quickly-be-potty-trained, cattle produce a great deal of urine, among other waste. Cattle urine has lots of nutrients that can be turned into fertilizer, but only if the urine can be collected.

So scientists wanted to know if they could take young calves and train them to urinate in a certain place, the better to collect it. They devised a standard kind of reward. Basically, it worked like this: Urinate over here and we'll give you a sugar treat.

The calves figured it out very fast. 

Read the story. It's very fun. You'll never drive by another calf without thinking about how smart they are.