2752 Grazer Trivia

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.
-- Jacob Bronowski --

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This is cool. I had noticed that cattle grazing in a field almost all seemed to be facing the same direction. I'd always thought it was just that they were all moving the same direction.

The folks at Princeton have discovered that the direction is always north/south.

From the paper "Magnetic alignment in grazing and resting cattle and deer", 04/2008, at http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2008/08/22/0803650105.abstract:

We demonstrate by means of simple, noninvasive methods (analysis of satellite images, field observations, and measuring “deer beds” in snow) that domestic cattle (n = 8,510 in 308 pastures) across the globe, and grazing and resting red and roe deer (n = 2,974 at 241 localities), align their body axes in roughly a north–south direction.

That's magnetic, rather than geographic, north/south.

This observation was followed by an Oxford paper, "Extremely low-frequency electromagnetic fields disrupt magnetic alignment of ruminants", 02/2009, at http://www.pnas.org/content/106/14/5708.abstract:

Here, we show that extremely low-frequency magnetic fields (ELFMFs) generated by high-voltage power lines disrupt alignment of the bodies of these animals with the geomagnetic field. Body orientation of cattle and roe deer was random on pastures under or near power lines. Moreover, cattle exposed to various magnetic fields directly beneath or in the vicinity of power lines trending in various magnetic directions exhibited distinct patterns of alignment.

So, power companies, want to tell us again about how power lines don't affect bird migrations, or bee navigation, or cattle health, or development of children, or leukemia, or autism, because they "obviously" have no effect on any living tissue?

An unaddressed thought - A lot of cows don't graze loose in fields, but are fed in barns or from bins next to the fence. For happier cows, should we arrange the "table" so the cows are facing north or south when they dine?
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