I know, I know. It’s grilling season. You’ve got a freezer full of 80-20 chuck burger patties ready to kiss with flame. You’ve got a very expensive beef rib planned for the smoker. The last thing you need right now is some dork scientist bringing hard evidence to the dinner table, suggesting cows are intelligent enough to recognize humans just by looking at our faces.
Unfortunately, according to a new study published in PLOS One, that might be the case.
Researchers in France tested 32 Prim’Holstein dairy cows to see whether they could distinguish between familiar and unfamiliar humans by their faces and voices. The results suggest cows may actually have a complex ability called cross-modal recognition, meaning that they can gather information from multiple senses to identify individual humans.
Cows Might Be Smart Enough to Recognize You, Which Makes Burgers More Complicated
In the experiment, cows watched silent videos showing the handlers they had been around for years, as well as clips of strangers they had never encountered before. The animals consistently spent more time staring at unfamiliar faces, suggesting that they could tell the difference between people they knew and those they didn’t. The researchers then superimposed audio recordings of men speaking identical phrases onto videos. When the voice matched the correct phrase, the cows focused on the screen for longer, indicating to the researchers that they were linking the voices to the person.
In other words, cows can put faces and voices together the same way humans do. Meaning, cows are much more socially and cognitively complex than once thought, complicating their starring role in backyard barbecues. Earlier this year, it was found that cows were beginning to understand how to use tools. There is mounting evidence that these adorable, docile, and unfortunately delicious creatures are much smarter than we ever gave them credit for…or maybe much smarter than we ever wanted to think they were.
Why? Because we are smart enough to know that if something is this intelligent, it probably shouldn’t be killed en masse.
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