Have you ever met someone with a really strong trait? For instance, a friend of mine is extremely active–always jogging here and there, to and fro. I went on vacation with her, and although she was a bit more relaxed than usual, she was still relatively much more active than most other people on vacation (i.e. me). Similarly, in the study I’ll summarize here, I set out to learn if cows have strong traits that are expressed relatively consistently across different contexts.

In California, ‘breeding stock’ herds of beef cattle graze on extensive rangelands, which can be hundreds to tens of thousands of acres in area. Rangelands provide crucial ecosystem services (think pollinators, carbon sequestration, etc.), and the way cattle graze can either benefit or diminish these services. Breeding/grazing herds are composed of female cattle that produce calves each year; individual cows stay in the herd as long as they can continue to have healthy calves, which can be for 10 years or longer. That’s a lot of time to be an optimal or suboptimal grazer! 

Depending on the size of the operation and the area of the rangeland, producers and ranch managers may rarely see these nomad female herds. It can be extremely difficult to monitor or influence their movements, making it hard to know–or change–grazing patterns, even when they aren’t ideal for rangeland health. When cows are seen, it’s for health checks, vaccinations, or weaning–situations that involve some level of handling. 

I wanted to examine whether female cows in these long-term herds showed consistent behavioral traits in both a handling context and while grazing across extensive landscapes. The purpose of this was to know if producers could predict cattle grazing behavior while on range by the way they responded to handling, isolation, and a choice paradigm between food and other cows. If this was the case, producers might have a tangible, low-cost way to infer grazing behavior –without fancy (and notably expensive) tracking equipment and redirection efforts. 

To explore this, I tracked cows with GPS collars and observed them in a handling/isolation context. These were published as two separate studies , each with some cool results (check ‘em out!). In the current study, I combined the  two studies together using data from 50 cows that were handled and tracked for two summers of rangeland grazing. 

From the first two studies, we found that cows were consistent both in grazing patterns and handling responses between years. In the current study, we found that cows that were slower–perhaps more cautious or passive–during handling also displayed more optimal grazing patterns. They tended to graze by traveling higher on range and further from watering sites. This may be a consistent trait where cows readily observe and respond to their environment, both in a handling context and as foraging and water resources change throughout the grazing season. 

Cows with longer latency to consume supplement feed did not travel as far on rangeland, potentially indicating that generally, in any context, they were less willing to travel farther away from social mates to access food. Though consistency in grazing and consistency across handling occurrences has been seen in these populations of beef cattle, this study was the first to relate these two contexts together in hopes of predicting grazing patterns by responses to handling.

This was an exploratory study to establish a potential relationship between behaviors during handling and grazing patterns. However, it is important to not overstate the implications of the relationship that we found in this study. I would not advise producers and land managers to go out and start culling (or removing from the herd) flighty or less food-motivated cows. The next step after this study is……..drum roll…. yet another study, as it often is in science! A follow-up study to this should alter herd composition based on observations of cattle in a handling context. The simple, and most informative, takeaway from this study is that consistent cattle traits matter. Ranchers and producers that are considering, possibly very expensive, grazing interventions (like fencing, or enticing cows to upland areas with supplement, water, etc.) should know that potentially these interventions will only work on certain cows in the herd with specific traits. That detail may save a lot of time, effort, and money and get some gears turning on customizing cattle traits represented in the herd to graze certain landscapes optimally.

References:

Creamer, M., & Horback, K. (2025). Cows that are less active in the chute have more optimal grazing distribution. Scientific Reports, 15(1), 58.

Maggie Creamer is currently a postdoc at NC State University College of Veterinary Medicine. She is working on a project investigating how chronic pain in dogs with Osteoarthritis may lead to cognitive dysfunction and negative affective states. She continues to be passionate about animal welfare and is excited about this new opportunity to look at how an animal’s pain state may alter their ability to function in their environment. Although she misses the cows and beauty of the Sierra foothills, it is also extremely fun to work with dogs all day every day!

Edited by Isabelle McDonald and Nicole Rodrigues