AgriCulture bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week, Mark writes: On this extremely hot afternoon smack in the middle of a short (we hope) heat wave, I am very thankful not to be living in the Midwest, where the extremely hot afternoon would have been preceded by a month of similarly awful hot afternoons and followed (if forecasts are accurate) by a seeming eternity of awful hot afternoons. For us, the heat brings to the fore one of the farm responsibilities we haven't had to pay much attention to most of the summer: Since the early days of spring, the animals have managed to make themselves comfortable without tremendous effort on our part. These days, they need our help. Until the other day, I did not know that there is a science of animal comfort: "hedonic ethology". The New York TimesScience section this week had a report by Katherine Bouton on a new book on this topic, The Exultant Ark: A Pictorial Tour of Animal Pleasure by Jonathan Balcombe. I have not yet read the book, but The Times assures us it is not merely an album of cutesy photos of piglets tumbling in play, macaques sunning themselves together on rocks, and giraffes nuzzling with their young. It has a serious accompanying text, in which it is argued quite logically that animals' ability to feel pain, which everyone would acknowledge, must naturally imply an inverse ability to experience pleasure. That ability reinforces our growing understanding that animals are fully sentient beings and that we, therefore, have an ethical responsibility to treat them well in order to increase their pleasure. Not that we act entirely without self interest here. As Balcombe points out, happier animals have better survival and reproductive success.
We are pretty sure that we'll increase the animals' pleasure these days if we give them ways to avoid the heat of the sun. Our cows need no help on this score since they have discovered the coolest, breeziest spots themselves, one of them just across the fence from the cool, breezy spot where we most like to sit in the back yard. The cows know how to find comfort. But the sheep are less resourceful about shade. They don't seem to understand that trees will supply relief on super hot days; the only shady spot they crave seems to be the barn. Most of the summer, we try to exclude them from the barn except for brief visits for grain treats. But when the heat is this excessive we accede to their wish for indoor time on the cool shaded concrete floor of the barn. We reconcile ourselves to having to muck out the mess they leave in the barn when the weather cools down a bit. Like us, in this heat the animals also need to be frequently and amply hydrated, This means refilling water tanks for all the animals two or even three times a day. Even when water containers appear to have plenty of water, we've got to test the temperature and often dump and refill them with cold water, as the animals are just as unenthusiastic about drinking hot water as we might be. There is always the danger that we extrapolate too much from human experience in determining what will make animals happier and more comfortable. Observing them closely is the only way to really learn their preferences. Some of our observations almost rise to the level of the scientific method, perhaps making us hedonic ethologists. Three weeks ago, for example, I thought we were able through observation to establish a clear hierarchy of bovine pleasures. We were finally trading our beloved bull, Tommy, for a new one, with a different blood line, from Herondale Farm. (We had initially scheduled the trade for late May but Jeremy Peele, Herondale's owner, thought we had better postpone until July when he was ready to place his bulls with the cows for breeding. Introducing a new face to the bull pen without the distraction of cows in heat to breed, he suspected, would lead to fighting.) In order to avoid conflict and make for a smooth exchange when Jerry arrived with the new bull, we wanted to confine Tommy to the paddock. I figured apples, which cows love, would be the way to draw him in. I went up to Tommy, who was standing in the shade nearby, with a bucket of apple slices. He was, as I predicted, quite happy to eat them from my hand. At least while he was standing in the shade. But he was not, it turned out, willing to follow me out into the hot sun of the paddock just to get more slices. Shade trumped food. What to do? When Jerry, practiced stockman that he is, arrived, he immediately fixed on a solution. He asked whether we had any cows in heat. We knew we did as our youngest cow and Tommy had been bellowing across the fence at each other for days. At Jerry's suggestion, Peter moved that cow into an adjoining paddock near the barn where Tommy could see her. And when she appeared there, Tommy was out of the shade and into the paddock, where we wanted him, in a flash. On that hot summer Sunday, we executed what seemed to me to be a perfectly controlled scientific experiment, in which two stimuli competed with a third, and clearly established a hierarchy of urges. Shade may have trumped food, but both were completely eclipsed by the power of sexual desire. Peter has questioned the validity of my experiment's design and conclusion, saying that it could just have been that Tommy sensed a trap when I tried to lead him with apples, a trap he did not sense when he saw the cow. But I'd like to think of that observation as my coming of age as a hedonic ethologist.
According to the Times, Balcome also suggests that animals may experience their own unique pleasures, types of pleasure inaccessible to humans. Maybe so. As we've learned, some animals have special needs and special mechanisms for making themselves comfortable. Pigs have no pores and hence cannot sweat. Their best mechanism for cooling down is to dig a hole in a wet spot, a wallow, and lie in it. Hence the expression, "Happy as a pig in mud". In this heat, even our marshy back field where the pigs spend the summer has been drying up, so every morning, we dutifully run a hose to five or six of their favorite wallows to create the mud for them, giving them a most welcome shower in the process if they're around when we're doing it. Carmen and Miranda used to love such showers so much they went into hilarious pirouettes to get the full effect. But should this pleasure of the wallow really be reserved to pigs alone? Lacking air conditioning, and closely observing the pigs' pleasure, I'm contemplating that we might enjoy having a mud wallow of our own. If the heat keeps up more than another day, this is going to the top of my Project List, so that we, too, can be happy as pigs in mud. —Mark ScherzerFor the complete archive of past AgriCulture blogs, click here.
