Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Cows--Seek versus Fear

In her book Animals Make Us Human, Dr.  Temple Grandin says  that cows are by nature very curious.  However, they can flip from fear to seek and seek to fear almost instantaneously.  She talked about walking around the cattle pens and leaving a clip board with papers on the ground.  The cows were fascinated with the clip board and would come up and inspect it--until the wind rustled the papers which made it a scary thing to run away from.  When the wind stopped, they would march right up and inspect the binder again.  Below is a video illustrating the fear to seek switch in cows. 

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