painting cows as zebras protects them from insects, study finds

Yamagata is a very agricultural region in the north of Japan, with many cattle farms. And as in the rest of the country, breeders are worried about the stress caused to their animals by insect bites. These are areas where there are a lot of horseflies and anthrax flies which also feed on the blood of animals. They attack cows who spend a lot of time trying to chase them away with head or tail gestures. These actions represent less time to graze in peace and, on the scale of a herd, it means less productivity for the farmer.

Researchers have therefore tried to reduce these insect attacks without necessarily resorting to insecticides. EBetween 2021 and the end of last year, they experimented on animal coats. They painted cows as zebras to see if the insects changed their behavior. Pto transform the coat of cows, itAs with humans who go to the hairdresser, we use bleaching powders. So the researchers made liters of bleaching lotion and drew large white stripes, five centimeters wide, across their bodies on the cows to make them look like large zebras.

Three times fewer movements to chase away insects

Then, they observed their behaviors for months. They found that cows painted as zebras made significantly fewer annoying movements against the biting insects. They only move five times per minute, whereas in the same field, a cow without discoloration moves 16 times per minute to chase these insects. They concluded that horseflies and anthrax flies were disturbed by these color alterations. The cows find themselves protected by a sort of optical illusion.

These zebra stripes do not hinder the cow in its relationships with other animals, this was one of the concerns of the breeders. But neither the Yamagata researchers nor the farmers noticed any change in behavior within the herd. Zebra cows are very well accepted by monocolor cows.