(birds chirping) - Tim, you grew up on a farm and lived around livestock growing up. Did you ever think about how your farm animals thought or how they behaved with each other? - Not really, I mean, maybe a bit with our horses and dogs. Never really thought about with any of the other farm animals. - Not even your cows. - Well, definitely not cows, we didn't have any. - Well, just like most of us, we don't have cows. - And like most of us, we probably have not thought about the inner thoughts running through cows' minds either, but not our guest. He has not only thought about how cows think, but has written a book on it. - Yeah, our guest, Gregory Burns, is a professor of psychology at Emory University, where he directs the center of neuro-policy and the facility for education and research in neuroscience. He pioneered the use of brain imaging technologies to understand human motivation and decision-making. And he now uses that background to explore the psychology of animals, specifically dogs and cows. His most recent book, Cow Puppy, an unexpected friendship and a scientist journey into the secret world of cows, is an example of that work. - So we were fascinated and we wanted to talk to Gregory about his research and the secret world of cows. (upbeat music) - Welcome to Behavioral Groups, the podcast that explores our human condition, along with the inner condition and thinking of cows. I'm Kurt Nelson. - And I'm Tim Hulahan. We talk with researchers and other very interesting people to unlock the mysteries of not just our behavior, but cow behavior by using a behavioral science lens. Did you ever think we would be saying those words? - Tim, no. - All right, so this is a bit of a departure from our normal interview, but Gregory has done an outstanding job of taking his lived experience of buying a farm a few years ago and exploring the neuroscience of a psychology of the animals that he brought on. - Yeah, in fact, he tells the story of not just the inner workings of their brains, but the relationships that they have with each other and himself. As always, we at Behavioral Groups are looking to bring you concepts outside of your normal everyday experience and help you understand our world in a different manner. - Yeah, our world, that's the key. - Okay, so with that, sit back with your best glass of ice cold milk and enjoy our conversation with Gregory Burns. (upbeat music) - Dr. Gregory Burns, welcome to Behavioral Groups. - Hey, great to be here. - Thanks for joining us, and we wanna start with a speed round and the first question is, do you prefer coffee or tea? - Well, it's a hard one 'cause I've drinked both, but we'll go with coffee. - We'll go with that. That sounds like an answer that if you would have had to pick tea on the other side, it wouldn't have been that big of a deal. - Well, it depends on time of day, coffee in the morning, tea in the afternoon. - There you go. - Oh, that's so interesting. I wonder how that habit develops. We've had a lot of guests on who have said that. - Well, I'm really interested to spend some time in the UK. That's how. (laughing) - So in afternoon tea. - All right, okay. - Greg, would you prefer to live in the city or live on a farm? - Oh, definitely a farm, no question. - Definitely a farm. We'll talk, I'm sure we're gonna be talking a little bit about that as we move forward, so yeah. - Okay, third speed round question. Would you prefer a few dogs or a few cows to hang out with for an hour? - Ooh, that's a tough one. (laughing) In my former life, I would have said dogs, but now it's cows. - Is it really? - Wow. - Wow. - That's, that's. - If they're my cows. - If they're my cows. Yes. (laughing) - Okay. - Okay, all right. - Oh, well, and you have written a book about both dogs and now cows, and we'll get into that. But, so here is, here is our final, final question. And I apologize to our listeners in advance because this is an inside baseball question almost, but we'll get into it in the interview. Greg, does Ricky Bobby hold a grudge? (laughing) - Ricky Bobby can hold a grudge, but he also forgets. (laughing) Good to hear. - Okay, well, and I'm sure our listeners are now really totally confused, but we are speaking with the author of Cow Puppy, an unexpected friendship and a scientist journey into the secret world of cows, Gregory Burns. And I think we should just start by asking, how does a behavioral scientist get into raising cows? - That's a good question. And I'm not sure I have a straightforward answer to that because it was not in my life plan at any point. You know, but I think like a lot of people goes back to the COVID pandemic. And when we were all just kind of sitting at home on Zoom, you know, as a university professor, previously running a project to train dogs to go and MRI scanners, that was shelved. And with all that time on my hand, I kind of started indulging my green acres fantasies. (laughing) Gee, what would it be like to live in the country? Since, you know, I've spent a lot of time doing things on the computer. I could theoretically do that from anywhere. And that's not entirely true. But that's kind of what kicked it off. And just kind of started really fantasizing about what it would be like to live on a farm and grow vegetables and have all the animals that I want. And then, I don't know if my wife and I found kind of a really magical place about 40 miles south of Atlanta and just took the lead. And how did it, so it's interesting, again, to understanding that there are a lot of people during COVID who went and kind of, you know, said, oh, I can have this, take this opportunity and go live maybe a more country, rural life and various different pieces. And understanding that farm and that green acres piece that you just said, but bringing the cows in is its own unique little story. So can you talk a little bit about like the cows and the type of cows that you brought in? Because I think our listeners are going, okay, are they milk cows, are they beef cows? What is this and help us understand that a little bit? - Yeah, so we made the leap in January of 21, so kind of deep pandemic time, right? And so the month is significant 'cause that was the middle of winter. And so, you know, we moved to this farm, which was previously a horse farm. So there were probably about 15 acres and pastures that were kind of nicely fenced. And I didn't have a clear idea on the animal side of it. I kind of had this big notion that, you know, we would start growing vegetables and I don't know why, but I thought maybe I'd set up a stall at the farmer's market, but that is ridiculous. - Yeah, no, for me, it's ridiculous because that's not me. I have a hard time just sitting still and, you know, manning a booth at farmer's market would be unpleasant for me. So, but I didn't think that through clearly. And what I had told myself was, okay, well, the first year on the farm will just be an experiment. You know, I'll try a whole bunch of different things. We'll try to run vegetables. We'll see what works, what doesn't. And I didn't really think too much about the animal side of it other than the fact that we had four dogs. But what happened was pretty much by early spring. So I live in Georgia. So the winters are very mild and short. So usually by about March, the grass and things start just growing crazy. And then I found myself spending a lot of time on the tractor just mowing the pastures down because they were getting too tall. And it's like, well, this is really dumb. I live on a farm or a potential farm. This is a job for animals to, you know. - Right, right. - Grays the pastures. And the configuration of the existing fencing really dictated what kind of animals I could get without getting into building new fences, which is laborious and expensive. It might have gone the way of goats, but the fencing wouldn't contain them. So it was either gonna be something like horses, sheep, or cattle. I grew up with horses. I love horses, but I didn't want to go that route because they're very high maintenance. They require a lot of DLC. And plus you gotta ride them. And where was I gonna ride them? So that led me to cattle. And there are several cattle farms around where I live. They all kind of raised standard beef cattle, mostly black Angus, a lot of that. But I do nothing about cows, not zero. I have no experience with them. I don't think I've ever met one. And the big, these big cows were rather intimidating to me. And then I kind of just randomly came across and out on Craigslist, you know, there's a farm section on Craigslist. - Who knew? - Who knew? - I just wanna add for three miniature cows. Oh, okay, miniature sounds pretty good. And check them out, it was a bull and two cows. And that's like, okay, let's do this. Let's bring them to the farm. And that's how it started. Really just as biological mowing machines. (laughing) - So at some point though, you go from having your scientific experimental mind saying, we're gonna try a bunch of things. Let's try cows. But at some point, you kind of fall in love, right? - Yeah, it's a little hard to pinpoint. Well, a couple of things happened. So the person I brought them from, he had told me that the two females, the two cows were pregnant, but couldn't tell me exactly when they were likely to cow. And he dropped them off and he basically said, you're gonna have a surprise soon. (laughing) And indeed, I hadn't had them, but two weeks in the first one, calf. - So that was a surprise. - Yeah, so talk about rapid learning curve. (laughing) Fortunately, they didn't require my assistance in a major way, so I didn't have to get in there and pull calves or anything like that. There was some trickiness in getting the first calf to latch on to her mama, which it's kind of interesting in retrospect. You think animals just do all these things naturally. And it's not 100%, true. I mean, they have these instincts, but especially the first 24 hours are critical for these animals and sometimes they need a little help to make calf and mama match up and mesh. So after we got over that and then the second one, calf, I started kind of really hanging out with them just to see how things were going with them. And the females were always kind of standoffish, but the bull, we named Ricky Bob after the character in Talladega Nights, he had kind of a goofy, fun loving personality and he was actually pretty friendly and would come up and beg for little treats and stick out his tongue and give a treat. And so we started bonding a little bit and I used the treats that you give a cow. I mean, they eat grass and they're surrounded by it, so it's not like they're constantly hungry. So you have to have things that entice them. They seem to like these things called cattle cubes, which are just alfalfa pellets. And what happened one evening was I had poured a bunch in the feed trough and they were gobbling them up and Ricky Bobby just gobbled up too many and they got a bunch stuck in his throat and started gagging, which is kind of, which is a frightening sight to see a bull gagging because it starts to panic. So I kind of just approached him very slowly and just kind of started massaging his throat and kind of pushed the things down a little bit, which he seemed to appreciate because after that, he would come up to me and just kind of like stick his head out and put his head on my shoulder and like, he rubbed my neck place. - Mm. - And so it was kind of at that point then I started, I guess, falling in love with him that, you know, it's like, wow, these creatures, in many ways they're very doglike. They have this capacity to form bonds with us humans and in many ways are more affectionate than dogs 'cause I tell people dogs are easy. - Yeah. - Dogs are evolved to, you know, they're almost sick offense, you know, they're hanging around us, they're, yeah. They're everyone's friends, the cow's not so much, it's much harder earned and they're slower to warm up, but once they accept you and they're extremely loyal and very affectionate. - One of the things that I discovered through the book is this, the fact that cows have their own personality and you were able to describe some of those personalities inside of the book, can you talk about, so how does one determine a cow's personality and what are some of those different traits that they have? - Well, let me ask first, why is that surprising? - I don't know. (both laughing) - I will fully admit, I am a city boy. You know, when I was younger, we had a cabin that has an ex to a farm that had cows, but my interaction with cows is at a state fair and I just kind of think, you know, hey, do we, you know, I'm never around them long enough to really have any kind of solid interaction where that can form, be I just kind of never even really thought about it, I guess, maybe if I did, that might have been something that came up, so. - Yeah, well, I think that's, that probably describes over 90% of the population in the US's experience or lack of experience with cattle. - Yep. - You know, we see them, you know, if you live in the country or you go through the country, you'll see them, you know, just kind of dotting the landscape, kind of just like inert objects. 'Cause they don't, you know, most of the time they don't move that much or that quickly. They can, but they really don't have reason to. So, so I see why it's easy to kind of dismiss the possibility that they have individual personalities or differences, but to answer your question, it just comes through observation. And what I did, kind of just my background in neuroscience and psychology, I just took kind of what we use in psychology to describe human personalities. So, you know, there are many, there are many different ways to measure human personality that they pretty much all rely on some kind of questionnaire, right, you know, yes, questions about your things you like, you don't like. - It would have been difficult to get a cow to fill out the questionnaire though. - Yes, exactly. But kind of one of the kind of standard personality models, so people debate over kind of how many dimensions there are to personality. But, you know, one of the, one of the common ones has what's called the big five, five factors. So, that includes things like how open you are to novelty, you know, or you tend to be more active, inactive. Things like that, are you outgoing, are you introverted? Just basic things like that. And you can take those, and though you can't ask an animal, I mean, this applies to any animal, you can't ask them how they feel about things, but you can make observations. And anyone who has had pets certainly knows this, whether it's dogs or cats, everyone knows, it's like they have individual personalities. You know, some are gonna be shy and hang back and others don't care. Same with cows, it was just a matter of observation. And once I had, once the calves were born, then I had five, and now I have 10, it's easy to kind of compare them to each other. You can say, oh, yeah, that one, that one's more outgoing because that's the one that always comes up first, or greets strangers first. So that's all I did. - Yeah, and are there just kind of thinking about these personalities and then relating it back to your work as a neuroscientist and psychologist? Are there some psychological benefits to humans to having relationships with, I guess, all animals in general, but specifically cows? - Yeah, there's a fair bit of research on the beneficial effects of animals on human health. And it's been argued for decades, really, that companion animals in particular have beneficial effects, potentially lower blood pressure. Basically anything kind of stress related, they have potential benefits for. I will say, I mean, there's a caveat to that, and that is it's, when I was working with dogs, I ran into this a lot. The potential is there, but for the exact reason I just said that animals are individuals, they're not the same. There are good and bad matches between, let's say, dogs and people. - Yes. - Oh, yeah. - You know, and oftentimes that it's a very important point that often gets lost in kind of these conversations about is like, oh, well, animals are great for human health. It's like, well, yes, if you have like a great dog or a great cat, but sometimes you don't. And it's not you, it's the dog or the cat. In which case then it becomes a source of stress. So just putting that out there, I would say cows are potentially kind of the same issue with some other differences, one, their size. So it's not that most people can't keep an animal. Mine are miniatures, but they still weigh three to 400 pounds. And yeah, the normal size cow would be closer to 1,000. And so you have a space and then my cows now, because they're so socialized, let me sit down with them and lean against them and basically, you know, cuddle with a micro dog. And it's extremely peaceful in ways that dogs are not actually. - Yeah, it's interesting that when we think about this idea of companionship with animals, and as you said, there needs to be a good fit, but there's also this, as you talk about in the appendix, this brief history of the cow, you end with a great quote, and I mean, it won't read through it all here, but this idea that, you know, we used to be an agricultural society and people interacted with animals and in particular livestock a lot more than they do today, is there something in what you've learned from this about what that means for us at a bigger picture? This idea that, hey, you know, in 1790, I think it was, it said 90% of the US population was engaged in agriculture in 2020, that was under 2%. You know, what does that have to, what does that imply or what are some of the implications of that from your perspective? - Yeah, I mean, there's been a steady, unrelenting shift of the population from rural communities to urban communities, and so, you know, now, well over 80% of the US population lives in an urban area. So there's essentially no contact with animals other than dogs and cats and kind of other peculiar companion animals, but no livestock, right? - Sure. So as we started out, most people have no knowledge, no experience of these animals. And so I think we've, you know, it's something that's been lost. You know, I mean, they're obvious trade-offs. I don't think anyone would argue that, you know, we need to disperse cities and everyone needs to live in the country. That's not what I'm saying, but many of these animals are, you know, used for various purposes, whether it's milk, dairy, or beef, or other animals. So in 200 years ago, if you were fortunate enough to have meat to eat, you likely knew the animal that it came from, right? Because, you know, families would keep, you know, small numbers of livestock and then, you know, slaughter them when they needed meat and preserve it and keep it, you know, for however long. And so there was always this close relationship between the humans and the animals. And that kind of fostered, you know, better care for these animals, you know, they tended to them. - Yeah. - And, you know, now, you know, consumers are so divorced from, you know, the animal itself, you know, you see a stake in the supermarkets, like, okay, well, that's a piece of meat, that's all it is. So we've lost that. And I think just the purpose of the book is not to tell people, you know, not to eat animal products, but to be more cognizant of where they come from and ideally know where they come from. - Yeah. It's interesting because as you're talking about that and as I was reading the book, one of the things that came to mind is my daughter was in a fantastic school that actually had a farm. So we live in Minnesota and they had a farm in Wisconsin. And as part of the junior high experience that they had, they would go live on that farm for three weeks plus then other times throughout the school year and then they often had summer programs there. So it, in granted, they had, it was more of a vegetable kind of farm. And so they worked and grew the vegetables and various different things, but they did have, they had chickens and they had llamas and they had pigs, they didn't have any cows, but they had different elements and sheep. And so just having that experience, which I never, you know, as I mentioned earlier, I don't have any of that background with that. Is there value from your perspective for programs like that and should we, you know, maybe as a society be thinking like, "Hey, we need to get people, particularly our kids," more associated with some of the livestock and what's going on on these farms. - I'm curious, what did she say about it? I mean, what was the impression of it? - She loved it. I mean, it was outside of the fact that they had to, as part of also, they had to cook their, you know, they were the ones who cooked their meals and cleaned up, but, you know, the livestock art and the fact that she loved going out to the barn and, you know, collecting eggs from the chickens in the chicken coop and, you know, and they were free range hands, so they're running around and various different pieces. And, you know, there's all sorts of wonderful things and she had absolutely nothing but positive things to say about it. - Did she come home and say, "I'm gonna be a vegetarian?" - No, she did not. She did not, and that said, you know, to that point, she didn't, interesting. - Should everyone do that? You know, I don't know. My colleagues at work in the city are, I have found to be largely uninterested in what I'm doing out here. - Wow. - Largely uninterested in kind of rural life. I think that alone is probably something that would benefit city dwellers is just, you know, spent a little time out in the country just to get a sense for what it is. - Yeah. - I couldn't agree more. I'm a curts the city boy, I'm a farm boy. And so I had that experience growing up and felt like, boy, my appreciation for the circle of life type things is as much different from a lot of my city dwelling, you know, friends, that's for sure. Greg, I'm curious as a scientist, what do you think has surprised you most about cows brains and their dispositions? Were there things that were like, wow, I just really didn't expect that or didn't anticipate that? - I mean, I guess I didn't think too much about their emotional lives or kind of the degree to which they would express emotions, primarily affection, even, you know, even to a casual observer, it might not be apparent what they're, you know, how they're expressing themselves. But Charles Darwin, you know, said this 200 years ago, you know, when he was developing his theory is that really all animals have to have emotions, that human emotions didn't just pop into existence, you know, when humans appear, they are on this continuum that exists in the animal kingdom, especially other mammals and that you can act, if you look closely, you know what to look for, you can see things in other animals, other species that bear a lot of similarities to what humans do. So we know dogs, I think the best. Darwin had dogs and they figured prominently in this theories of emotion on how they express emotions. So, for example, in dogs, you know, we recognize things like play-bows, what a dog wants to play, you know, they put their paws down and put their butt up in the air and wag their tail. Well, it turns out, if you know what to look for a cattle, you can see the same things and that was a surprise to me. It's just, you just have to look carefully and pay close attention. So I observe that with the calves, when they play, they have kind of a version of a play-bow and then how they express affection is unique to them. They lick each other. When I first saw them doing that, I thought, well, they're just grooming flies and parasites. - Yeah. - But that's not, actually, it's not the case because they're actually very, there's kind of a ritual that they go through. They, you know, if someone, one will approach another and they'll typically kind of put their head down a little bit and kind of waggle it slowly with the other one and they're clearly signaling kind of what we call an affiliative display. And then the other one will often start licking them on the head and the neck. And then sometimes they'll like stretch out their neck and that's what we call a neotenous behavior, meaning that a neotenous behavior is something that's held over from childhood or a juvenile animal into adulthood. And it's the exact same posture that a calf adopts when they're nursing underneath the mama cow. And so sometimes you see the adults doing that and kind of a big version of it. And then what was amazing once they accepted me and they started doing it to me, they lick me as well. (laughing) - Like you? - Yeah. - What does a cow's tongue feel like? Sorry, that's a total, off the cuff kind of question. - No, it's a good question. - It's not very pleasant, it's like a cat's tongue. - Oh, yeah. - It's just like a rough, much like very rough sandpaper, but much stronger than a cat. And sometimes they get really vigorous. I've had, if they keep licking me like on an arm or something, you know, they can give me like a little abrasion. - Oh, wow. Wow, well, I was a guy that grew up with horses and didn't, and had very, very little licking. It was about the only time that I would get the lick would actually be when I had an apple or a carrot in my hand. They were only licking my hand just to make sure they didn't miss any of the apple or the carrot. - Dude, cows learn from each other? - I think they do. It's a little hard to determine that, primarily because they're so strongly, you know, they're herd of animals and especially my group, which is they're all related. They're tightly bound to each other. So they graze together, they kind of do everything together. So I think that they do observe each other. I've certainly observed them observing each other and pick up what we call social learning. As we move forward, I might start doing kind of more rigorous cognitive testing on them, asking them to see what kind of things they can do. It's going to be challenging though, because to do those sorts of things, you need to take one animal and test them by themselves and they hate that. They hate being separated from the herd. - So which maybe leads into this next question. Can you explain what a bud box is and understand, then why does a handler have to understand cow psychology or to really work? - A bud box is named after one of the most famous early, early Stockman ranchers, his name was Bud Williams. And he was kind of the first person to really approach cattle psychology in a practical way. So he basically was a cowboy helping ranchers primarily in the West, so the range California as well. And he kind of observed them and the usual way ranchers deal with cattle is kind of with force, whether it's a horseback or dogs or now these UTVs. And Bud Williams kind of said, it's much easier to understand how cows think and essentially get cows to make the choice that you want them to do instead of forcing them to do things. And one of his mantras was slow as fast. So if you try to force cattle to do something, they will either spoop, run away, become obstinate and it will end up taking longer than if you just give them time and kind of restrict their choices and it's like, oh, okay, you're gonna go over here. But they think it's their choice. And his ideas, he never wrote anything about it. He did kind of a few videos I think in the '80s. Temple Grandin picked up on his work and really kind of developed it into more of a science. And so she came along and took these ideas and started designing handling facilities that kind of played into cattle's sensibilities, their psychology and minimizing things that they're afraid of. So a bud box is a very simple handling pen that Williams had developed. And it's really just a rectangle. It's just kind of set up with fencing in a rectangular configuration with an alleyway that comes off of one side at right angles. And then there's a couple of gates in the middle of it that you can open and close. And the idea is when you need the cattle to do something, go somewhere, I mean, I had to build one because I need to do things like vaccinate them, work on their hooves, just do basic stuff like that. - And you need to one at a time. You can't just do that in the herd. - Correct, right, so the idea is to get them to go in like a little alleyway and line up and then I can do things like give them shots or put a light repellent on them. But if I try to force them into doing that, they're just gonna run away. And so the Bud Box is a way to get them to kind of come into this closed space, usually start with one side open and then you close it and then you can position yourself. If you stand in the right spot, then they'll just kind of walk around you and then they'll end up going in this alleyway. And you don't have to use force. You just kind of playing into their sensibilities and their visual systems and kind of the way they think. The first time, 'cause I had to build one because I was having a really hard time doing things like vaccinations. The bet would come out and she did it the first time. We had them all up in the barn and she basically said, "I'm not doing this again, you gotta figure out." (laughing) - This is your job. - You know, get your handling system in order. We're not gonna chase cows around for you. - It's interesting 'cause you talk about, again, that idea of understanding the cow's psychology of how they, you know, that slow is fast, that other elements of it. And I think there's so much insight into, you know, you're doing this with cows, but it's as much the person handling them. You know, we think it's, "Oh, it's the cow." No, it's you, how you are approaching this. And I think that's also what you're talking about from the difference in how Bud had thought about it versus maybe the tendency of, you know, the rest of the cattle ranchers out there who might not have had that kind of perspective. - It's still not a common perspective, I think, in cattle industry, but kind of going on that point, you're right, it is the handler. And I think kind of understanding that also gets into their therapeutic effect because when you say slow is fast with what that's forcing you to do is slow down yourself, they will pick up, you know, your emotional state, and if you're angry, if you're agitated, tense, they will pick up on it and they don't wanna be around you. - Just like people. - Yeah, yep, yep, yep. So simply by necessity, you know, what they've forced me to do is when I go out there, you know, I just have to like, just if I'm upset about something, I just say, okay, take a deep breath. So now if I am upset about something, I go out there and they calm me down 'cause I have to be calm. - Do you bring your guitar with you and play Sweet Home Alabama for them also? - I have, and so this gets into like, how do you call cows up to the barn or how do you call them? I can call them with my voice, but, you know, if they're like way out in the pastor, then they might not hear me and I'd have to yell. So I decided to start experimenting with calling them with music. - I love it. - Right, and Tim's alley, right? - And down, Tim's alley, right? - And how did, how did, yeah. - Yes, and how did this get started? How did you, again, you're a psychologist, so you know what operative, you know, these kind of operative training things are, but how did you get started? - So I play a little guitar myself, and so initially, I thought, okay, well, I'll just introduce them to music. I'll just go out to them in the pasture with my acoustic guitar and, you know, play a little riff or something. So of course it's a momentous decision and well, what should I play? 'Cause they don't have, of course, of course. - They've not heard any music that I know of, so it's kind of up to me what, how am I gonna inculturate them to music? - Well, you know, so I live in Georgia. You know, we've got this Talladega nice theme going. So Talladega's in Alabama for the non-mask art fans. So it seemed like Sweet Home Alabama seemed to have, right? - Oh, so I started playing that riff. Initially I did it on the guitar and they were like, "What is that?" (laughing) - As in, they were non-plussed, right? - Yeah, I think that's fair to say. They were more kind of like, there's more about the guitar as an object, a foreign object than the sounds coming out of it. So I decided then just to play the song through a Bluetooth speaker, which I could then take around and, you know, like crack it up, then I could call them from anywhere. So that's what that's how it started. I've brought in their taste though, so I now have a Cal playlist on my phone. - Well, you know, Barnes and Music have a long history. I think about, like, Neil Young recorded a lot of harvest in his barn on his ranch in California, and James Taylor even built a barn and is placing the Berkshires to have his recording studio and his barn. Do you keep instruments in the barn just to serenade the cows every now and then? - I haven't, but that's not a bad idea. - Do you use music in the barns at all? I mean, is it therapeutic for the cows? Does that calm them down? - Surprisingly, there has been one research study that addressed that. It was actually in the context of a dairy farm. - Yeah. - And basically, they played different genres of music. - Okay, the results were kind of equivocal, I would say. And I forget what genres that he claimed were calming to the cows, and I think they were measuring heart rate. Some, I think it was country. I wanna say some kind of elevator type music maybe, but it seemed to slow their heart rates a bit, but it didn't change milk production, so it's kind of what does that mean. My take on it though was, okay, if it's country, it's probably because the farmers are playing country music and the cows are just used to it. - Right, yeah. - Yeah, I actually saw that in the bibliography, I'm gonna have to check out that article, I have to admit. Greg, just out of curiosity, let's say that you were isolated on a desert island with your favorite cow companion, just for the sake of argument, and what two musical artists catalogs would you bring with you? For you and your cow companion? - I think probably the band. - Ah. - Because I play a fair bit of that for them, and that kind of fits in with the whole ethos, most of their opus, and then each boy's popped him to my head. - Big catalog, lots of variety too. - Yeah, yeah. - Do you have a preference for early or later works from the band? - I play, you know, probably, it's hard to say, you know. I play the weight a lot for the cows, that's one of the things in my play list. - Take a load up, Annie, huh? - Yeah, you know, and I mean, the song, I think has special meaning to a lot of, it does to me, you know, because I hear that song, the song's really about helping friends, and so I think that's, they help me, I help them, and that's why I like to play it. - I love that, and I think on that, I just want to say, thank you so much for being a guest on Behavioral Grooves, and sharing your load with us today. We appreciate it. - Oh, thank you, thank you. (upbeat music) - Welcome to our Grooving session, where Tim and I share ideas on what we learned from our discussion with Gregory, have a free flowing conversation, and groove on whatever else comes into our mood brains. - I was not expecting mood, I was not. You totally caught me on guard, I thought there'd be something psychological, but you just went with sound. - Moo, we're talking cows, what do cows say? - In the United States, they say mood, but in different countries, they have different words to describe. - Well, that's just accents, it's the cows' accents, of course, because if you're living in Germany, you have a German cow accent, dude. - Ooh, no, I don't think so. - Oh my gosh, so we have had a wide variety of topics on Behavioral Grooves, I mean, but if you would have asked me, when we were launching this thing, if we would have ever been talking about the psychology of cows, I would have said, you are crazy, you are just damn out of your mind. - 100% agreed, I mean, talking to primatologists, what felt like, and because we've had guests who were primatologists, and guests who were paleoanthropologists. - Yes. - That was a stretch. But this, we were off of the charts. And the great thing is that Greg's work really does help us understand us. - Yeah. - And I think, you know, you wrote this into the introduction, and I really love this idea of we can, by studying cows, we can understand us better. Our world better, and our relationships better. And that's really what I loved about this conversation. - Well, and I think it's also interesting. So you grew up on a farm, I did not. So, you know, city mouse versus country mouse here. - Oh, okay. - So is there a difference in how we even look at this because of that background from your perspective? - I think, I think very much so. And yet, because it's a proximity effect, right? I mean, I go back to a conversation with investors, and they talk about how where you live influences the kinds of industries that you invest in. If you live in Pittsburgh, you're more likely to invest in steel. - Yeah. - That sort of thing. And growing up on a farm, I do feel more sensitive and more connected to animals in general. And yet, and so I'm sensitive to their emotions and I'm concerned about how they behave. And I also kind of see a grew up in a world where it was the people that fed the animals, right? So the people took care of the animals, people got the vets in to take care of the animals when they got sick, they didn't heal themselves. So there was a caretaking kind of thing that went along with being on the farm, but not having cows growing up, actually, I feel a little disconnected from them. - Yeah. Well, I think it's interesting because as you said, that proximity effect, we talked about that with Coon Smits, right, as well, at one point. And I think there is another aspect of this is, yeah, I did not grow up on a farm. I don't have that connection like you do in my background with these animals. And so what I thought was one of the really interesting pieces of Greg's conversation near the end was this idea of understanding how we get our food and that for most Americans, maybe for most people in at least the civilized or world, right, there is this lack of really clear connection between what we put on our plate every day and how it got there and the animals and the people that are bringing that to the world. - That's so beautifully said. And this reminds me of sense foraging, how our lives benefit from being out of the world smelling the air, seeing the sunshine, looking at how it reflects on all the things around us. And Greg's conversation reminds us, hey, there's a world outside of everything that we think about normally that's feeding us, that's providing food for us. Now, whether or not you're a vegetarian for reasons of despising the idea of killing animals for the sake of our food, or you're like, I don't care, I think having some sensitivity to it and awareness can actually enrich our lives, it helps me maybe just be a little more human. - Right, and I think it's interesting and I wanna dig into that a little bit more. I think it was also interesting, just the cows have personality and that was Greg brought that up and the different cows that he had and how they reacted to each other and how they reacted to him. And then his relationship with those cows and an understanding that I think is just really powerful for me not having grown up with cows. I mean, we had a cottage that there was a farm behind us and we would go up and there was a tree house in the farm field. So we jumped the fence and go in there and my only encounter with cows was running away from them because they're big and huge and I was a little eight year old kid. - Did they choose you? - To a certain point, the farmer ran up after us one time as we kind of scared the herd and they were like moving which obviously hurts the milk productions. - That's right. - Don't hesitate them. - Yeah, but anyway, it's a different world understanding because I don't think about cows having personalities. I don't think about cows having relationships with other cows or with the people that they interact with even though Minnesota State Fair is starting this week and we go and we see them there but it's a very different and kind of removed experience. - The word personality, you've mentioned it a couple times and that was actually a new way for me to be thinking about relationships with cows. Growing up, we use the term disposition to talk about like our horses, like each horse had its own disposition, not a personality. - Yeah. - And so this is kind of mind-bending to think about the way that we interact with a cow isn't just a cow with a disposition, it's a personality which is anthropomorphizing to some word because some degree because the word personality starts with person (laughs) and so I think that it's really great again to think about the relationships that they have with each other, that those cows have with each other in the cow world, by the way, not in the human world. - Well, and all of the animals, right? I mean, this goes beyond just cows. Do your horses and their dispositions? Well, they had a personality person possibly. - Yes. - You could think about most mammals that have some sort of powerful brain relative to insects and other things and think about how they interact with each other, how they interact with us. Not even just domesticated animals, but, you know, boxes, bears. All right, I'm going. I'm stretching this, but it's all part of it. - Right, and so let's bring this back though because we could go way deep on animals. And I think more importantly for us and for hopefully for our listeners is what does this mean for us as humans? And this idea of paying attention, this idea that understanding the complexities and the dynamics and the interconnections of our world. And it reminds me of A.J. Jacobs and his 1000, thanks a thousand, where he took his morning coffee and I was, what did it take to get this cup of coffee to me that I enjoy? And thanking all of the people on that journey from the barista to the truck driver who brought the beans to going to South America to talk to the farmers, to the person who wrote the advertisement to all of those people of what it takes. And we don't think about that enough, I think. - It gets to savoring, it gets to sense forging, it gets to a sensitivity and awareness of the world that we don't have to sustain all the time. In fact, we can't sustain it all the time, it would be overwhelming. Our brains would just be overloaded. However, I think that it is a good thing what you're bringing up is to have that bit of gratitude, that sense of we're not alone in this. We're part of this ecosystem. I think that that's a really good thing that enriches our lives. It enriches my life, it could enrich my life at the office to think, I'm not the only one that's doing this job. There are a whole bunch of other people that are helping me do this job. How, in what regards are they contributing to my success? And what, in what regards am I contributing to their success? - And I think it can influence how our choices are made. Understanding, as Gregory said, it's not against eating meat. But let's explore where that meat is coming from and how those animals were treated in that journey from being a calf to getting on our plate at the restaurant. And can we be more purposeful about understanding that? And so understanding that dynamic is important. Now, it also means I have a lot more fricking work to do and I don't like that. I don't wanna have to think about, what? I mean, in all seriousness, I don't wanna have to worry about that. So it comes down to the behavioral science of this is the simpler we make things, then the easier it is for us. So even in understanding those connections and so farmers understanding how they can communicate, how they treat their animals and what that means and maybe that would imply that they can charge more because they're treating their animals in a more humane, better way. And I am going to be more likely to pay more for that. I know I will be really willing to pay more for that. - Wow, that's interesting. I was going in the direction of using the relationship to cows and the sensitivity to cows as a metaphor or as an allegory to help us understand our relationship with each other. And that recently I was in a coffee shop where there was a young down syndrome man working behind the counter. Now, I have my youngest brother has down syndrome. So super easy for me to interact with him. But there are people ahead of me who were obviously caught off guard and uncomfortable. And I think that it's just lack of familiarity. It's not something magic and it's not that they were bad people or anything that they just weren't familiar. But I wasn't, I think maybe what Greg Burns can instruct us on that we could learn from this is be a little more sensitive and be aware of the variety of people around us. - I love that. I love being thinking about the variety of people but our familiarity with them. And we think about many of the societal woes that we have and the tribes that we have separated ourself into. And how much of that is because of their familiar, my tribe is familiar that other tribe whether it be race, gender, political affiliation, sports team, fanaticism, whatever those other tribes are. They're the other and I don't have that familiarity of interacting with them. And I think that's a really great point. - Yeah, okay. I think we could wrap up the bovine discussion. - Oh, I'm not gonna do a moo thing again, am I now? - All right, so I just have to say, I love the diversity of guests that we have on the show. It's one of the things that I just find really rewarding of doing this. And if you love it as well listeners, then I implore you to take out your phone right now and text a buddy or a family member with a link to the show and just invite them to listen. - Yeah, pro tip, don't text a cow because cows do not have the ability to leave ratings and reviews and to actually enjoy our podcast. - Did you not read the book as a kid? Oh, it's about, I'm gonna have to, we'll put it in the show notes. It's like cows, texts, or cows right too. And it's about the cows taking over a typewriter and demanding the farmer give them better food. And then the chickens took over from them. It was really, I never read that. - Oh yeah, it's a great, great book. I'll have to remember what that is. - Okay. - And we'll put it in the show notes. - Humans, humans take out your phone, scroll to the bottom of Apple or Podbean or Spotify or wherever you're listening and playing these episodes, leave us just a quick review. Give us a quick rating. We would love to hear from you. - Yeah, five moves would be great. Five moves would be great. - No horns. - No horns, right. And Tim, on a whole separate note, aren't you going to be doing a listening tour here, coming up? - I am so starting in, well, I'm not going to say when, but just very soon after this episode is published. - So we're not quite sure when this episode is getting released. - That's where we're recording this, right? - Okay. - I want to talk to groupers. So I'm going on a conversation tour. - Conversation tour. - Yeah, which means I get to keep my fat ass in one place and get the people call me. But I want to spend 20 to 30 minutes having a deep discussion with you, our listeners and what we can do to make the show better. So if you're interested, there's a link in the show notes to my calendar where you can schedule time to talk with me. I want to hear everything about it. - Right, and note folks that we are having Tim do this because we know nobody would want to talk with me, but Tim, Tim is the guy that everyone wants to talk to. - Aw, Shucks Kurt, you're making me blush. - It's true, and true. And while we know that most of you will not take Tim up on this offer, I hope that a few of you will. We are looking to take the show to the next level, and we can only do that with your help. Who knows? You might even get a guest shout out or a clip on the show. - Oh, wouldn't that be interesting? Yeah, I like that. And let's frame it this way. 100% of the people who respond are going to be responders. So let's everybody who is a responder is going to respond. - Right, so if you're a responding person, then you should respond. - Click the link, make an appointment, let's talk. That's what I want to do. Okay, it's going to be so much fun. And with that, we hope that you take the insights from the secret lives of cows, and apply them to your own life this week as you go out and find your groove, or your move. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)
