“The cow is not a rock!”: a team demonstrates its curiosity and sensitivity to human emotions

Imagine standing in front of a cow in a meadow and discovering that it is not only observing you with curiosity, but also trying to understand your mood. This is what two French studies have shown: cows are not at all like stones — literally, “la vache n'est pas un caillou!”. The thesis is simple but unsettling: cows recognize our faces, our voices, and are able to distinguish whether we are happy or angry. They are not automatons that graze without conscience; they are animals with a much more refined sensitivity than we think. We are used to thinking of farm animals as simple, almost mechanical creatures, but new research radically changes our perspective. The protagonists of this story are a group of scientists from the Institut national de recherche pour l'agriculture, l'alimentation et l'environnement, near Tours, in the Loire region. They worked with the Holstein, those black and white cows that we often see in the French and Swiss countryside. In the laboratory, they installed two large screens to understand how these animals reacted to different human stimuli. One striking detail: the cows looked at the faces projected on the screens for a long time and showed a preference for those expressing joy over those expressing anger. Not only that: they were able to distinguish the voices of different people and associate the tone of voice with the expression on the faces. One researcher says that, after days of experiments, some cows even seemed to recognize the team members when they approached the barn, showing more attention or calmness if they had already "seen" them on the screens. Something you wouldn't expect: these cows are able to integrate visual and auditory information, an ability that until recently was thought to be typical of primates. Scientists have observed that cows become calmer if they see and hear a smiling person, while they become agitated if they perceive anger. Turning our classic idea upside down, this research suggests that farm animals are not passive spectators, but emotionally participate in relationships with humans. There is also a hidden question: if cows perceive emotions, how much does our behavior affect their well-being and, consequently, the quality of their lives — and even the milk they produce? Here is a perspective that is almost always missing: if we are surprised by the sensitivity of cows, perhaps we should ask ourselves how much we underestimate the emotional complexity of other animals with which we live every day. Perhaps it is precisely the species that seem most "mundane" to us that have a richer inner life than we imagine. The sentence that sums it all up: the cow is not a stone — it is a creature that looks at us and really hears us. If you've listened to this story and it's changed the way you see farm animals, you can choose I'm In on Lara Notes: it's not a like, it's a way of saying that this idea is now part of you. And if in a few days you find yourself telling someone that cows can distinguish joy from anger in our faces, on Lara Notes you can tag whoever was with you with Shared Offline: it's a way to capture a conversation that matters. This note comes from Le Temps and saves you 6 minutes of reading.