Hi guys, my name is Owen Atkinson. I'm a vet specialising in dairy cattle. And I'm really pleased to be here talking about a subject that I spend more and more time working with actually.

Introducing the concept of stress-free cattle handling and some of the areas around cow flow. Let's look to start to start to start off with why I feel it's an important subject. The benefits of stress-free cattle handling and also in this introductory little 1st 10 minutes or so we'll look at the introduction to some of the body language of cows.

Some of these signals that we pick up subconsciously, but it's nice to see what what it is that actually we are seeing that tells us what cows are feeling. So why stress free? So one of the reasons that really motivates me to try and promote this as a subject area that vets in particular should be taking leadership on is this whole area of accidents on farm.

There are too many accidents on our farms, dairy farms included. I have personally come across people who've lost their lives on dairy farms, not necessarily anyone's fault, but I think if we just have a little bit more awareness around how we're, we're, we're handling cattle, then I think that can help. So fewer accidents.

Second thing is reducing lameness. The way we move cows around and the way cows move around has a big impact on their foot health. The Third thing, more efficient milk production, and I'll delve into that in a little bit more detail in a second.

Better job satisfaction For people And of course welfare. Welfare is a huge reason why we need to improve. Our ability at stress free cattle handling.

So injuries, yeah, we don't have a great track record, unfortunately in the agriculture industry in terms of injuries on farm, not the type of thing that's shown in that photograph, but nevertheless, we kind of know the kind of particularly crush injuries that, that are very common with the large cattle. It's it's too easy to get hurt. So that's something where I think we can definitely improve on.

There's a nice bit of research being done in Australia. I will reference quite a lot throughout this training, this, this short webinar, some work done by, Paul Hemsworth, Professor Paul Hemsworth from Melbourne University, in Australia, and, This, table represents some of the, some of the findings that he's found that that if farms, dairy farms are trained with stress-free, handling techniques. Then the milk production goes up as well as the lameness coming down, so he had two groups of farms.

He had a negative group that weren't trained in stress-free cattle handling, so they carried on doing their normal things, and a positive group that did receive training, and that training would include the way the staff spoke to the cows. It would certainly involve a ban on all things like goat, electric goad sticks. Electric goads is not legal in this country anyway, a ban on dogs around the cattle.

Just some basic . Preventive measures to reduce the amount of stress, the amount of adrenaline that you might find in the herd, and he found that the milk production went up. As well as the lameness coming down in that positive control group of farms.

Now why might that happen? Well, there's a couple of different sort of, of theories perhaps on why when you have low adrenaline, when you've got low stress amongst a dairy herd, then that can improve production outcomes. There are two hormones really associated with stress.

There's a short term stress, adrenaline, you know, we all, we all know what adrenaline feels like if we have a kind of a near miss while we're driving around on the roads or something like that, you get a sudden instantaneous rush of adrenaline. Our heart rate goes up. We might get flushed in the face.

The hairs on the backs of our necks get raised, our blood pressure increases very, very quickly. And then there's the chronic. Stress hormone cortisol.

And that raises, that's that's raised when there is, is sort of . Stress over a long period of time and that cortisol as well as the adrenaline, I guess, but that cortisol level may, may be or may account for some of the physiological mechanisms. So cortisol is an immunity depressant, so that may, may be a factor, the fact that you've got high cortisol in the bloodstream and you've got immunosuppression.

But it may be that also when you have high levels of cortisol and also repeated bouts of adrenaline, then you have an increased metabolic stress. Your heart rate certainly goes up. And we talk a lot in the dairy industry, dairy cows, high producing dairy cows in particular, about the concept of oxidative stress.

When they have a very high metabolic rate, and they do, dairy cows work at 4 times maintenance, which is absolutely phenomenal when you compare it with sort of the endeavours of human athletes. No human athlete ever works at 4 times their maintenance level, maintenance being the sort of baseline metabolic rate. Then you get a lot of oxidative stress which is free radicals basically oxygen oxygen molecules with unpaired electrons attached to them, and they're floating around the body and those free radicals cause tissue damage.

In human beings, they also are a risk factor for cancer when you smoke. You get a lot of free radicals in your bloodstream, and that's why smokers have a high risk of, or one of the main reasons why smokers have a higher risk of cancer. So it may well be that that's a mechanism, you know, you've got these high levels of adrenaline, high levels of of cortisol that increases the metabolic rate and that increases oxidative stress which is which causes tissue damage.

Certainly, adrenaline is, . It, it stops oxytocin. I've forgotten what the technical word is, sorry for that, for that word, but .

An antagonist, sorry, it's an oxytocin antagonist. So oxytocin is important for mill letdown. Oxytocin will not work in the presence of adrenaline.

So there's another mechanism perhaps for why reducing stress can improve production. And then you've got all these behavioural things. So, so to get the best production from our dairy cows, we really need to have them eating little and often, being prepared to go to the feed fences and have little feeds all the way through the day.

So they should have really housed cows should have around about 8 feeding bouts per day. But when there's high stress, when there's overcrowding, for example, When the cows are very nervous of each other and they're not in a in a relaxed social group and you get more, more hierarchical conflict, then it reduces the number of feeding bouts and that can have a big effect on room health, room efficiency. And that can have a big effect again on production.

So there's lots of different, different mechanisms there. And the final one I've put up there is the effects on lameness, so increased sharing forces on the feet due to slipping, sliding, pushing around can cause lameness and lameness is also issue with low production. So lots of potential reasons why stress could have a direct impact on the economic bottom line, but That's the economics of, of, of reducing stress.

Let's not forget the welfare. And there are these extra reasons to teach stress free. Now last year, so I'm speaking in November 2022 and I'm making this recording, I think it was.

Late in 2021 or maybe it was early 2022, I can't remember, there was a Panorama programme, 14th of February 2020. There you are, called A Cow's Life, and this was uncomfortable viewing for any of us who are involved in the dairy industry. I don't know if anyone's seen this.

It was not a nice programme. It's expose of the dairy, dairy of a particular dairy farm actually in the United Kingdom and Like a lot of these programmes, you know, it had a bit of an agenda. You never know whether they sort of capture hours and hours of video footage, CCTV, hidden cameras, and then just distil it down to the bad clips.

That's always a possibility, but nevertheless there were things that happened on this dairy farm shown on this programme that should not happen around the handling of cattle and very uncomfortable viewing. And myself being involved with dairy farms, I know what happens on dairy farms. I kind of know that that these are not necessarily unique events.

Bad things do happen on dairy farms to do with the way people are handling cattle. So that top picture I'll explain what those two pictures show on the right here. This one here is not a bucket load of this is a bucket on the front end loader of a tractor.

It is not dead calves. These are live calves. They're being transported from the carving where they're being carved the carving pen.

It's a big farm, so maybe there might be 7 or 8 calves born overnight and they've been transported from the carving pen in this bucket to the baby calf unit, the calf pens. Now that is never ever acceptable. I must admit I've never ever seen this on any dairy farm, but when did that ever become acceptable on any of our farms in the United Kingdom to transport live sentient calves in a bucket like this and then tip them out into another pen?

That is just not acceptable. And the second picture on the bottom here is a cow in the milk Creek parlour, a rotary milking parlour. She's fallen over perhaps because she's fresh carved and she's maybe suffering from milk fever.

We don't know why she fell over that that happens. But then the farm workers are struggling to get her to get up and so they are, you can see they're kicking her, they're shouting at her, and again that should not happen. Cows will fall over from time to time.

Bad things can happen on dairy farms in terms of cows falling over and stressful situations for the herds people to deal with. Where we have gone wrong is not that the people are inherently evil. I don't believe that is the case, but I think there's two things.

One is that a lot of people who work on dairy farms. Have not been trained. In how to correctly handle cattle.

And the second thing is, There are perhaps too many people working on dairy farms who who are ignorant. In other words, they're not evil people, they're not inherently nice people, but they are ignorant of understanding about sentient beings and what it is, what a sentient being actually means, and that cattle and calves feel very much the same. They have the same emotions as we have as human beings, and I think we as as vets.

Can demonstrate more leadership in this whole area to improve the knowledge and understanding on dairy farms. So let's move on from that. I've tried to sort of .

Have an impassioned plea if you like, for more dairy vets to take this on as a task to improve understanding around the whole area of stress-free cattle handling on more of our farms and show leadership in this area. So some basic body language. There are 3 kind of features of a cow, cow's body language, which kind of can tell us a little bit how what her emotions she's emotions she's feeling.

One is head position, one is ear position. The ears are very, very expressive, and the other one is tail position, and then the final one is, is back posture. But we'll look at the head position and the tail position and, and, .

A little bit on ear position very quickly. So this is a field of suckler cows with their calves at foot, and you can see heads are up. Ears are very directional, you know, they're aware of my presence.

It's me taking the photograph, and they're very aware of my presence. And that heads held high is a high alert, high alert sign. Cows normally when they're in a relaxed state, heads are low, heads are at the ground.

So heads high. Usually means high adrenaline. Now, head held high doesn't always mean the same thing.

So we've got 22 photographs here of heads held high in, in, cattle. I guess he's a wildebeests. I don't, I'm not quite sure how they, what, what exact species the wildebeest is, but similar to the cattle.

And here's a lion and you see the heads are held high, high alert because they see the predator. And there's, there's a, a, a kind of, A physical reason why they want to hold their heads high, hold their heads high. Cattle, their vision is not the same as ours.

They have eyes on the side of the head. They have very good panoramic vision, but they can't see distance very well, so they need to be able to view threat straight in front of their nose because it's only really in a very small segment of their field of view that they can view, they can judge distance. So they'll be wanting to get their head up so they can see how far away that threat is.

And also they don't have a very good vision vertically in the vertical plane. They're used to sort of looking on the ground, I guess, and they're sort of their heads are down and they can see they can see a lot on the floor, but they can't see much above them. I think that's sometimes the reason why cattle are very, very startled by, for example, low flying helicopters or hot air balloons or Chinese lanterns which are well known for spooking cattle.

I think it's probably because they don't see them very well until the last minute. So they held their heads up high for that reason. The picture on the right, now that is a is a head head held high, but in a more dominant kind of head held high.

It's, it's, it's not necessarily a threat. It's more of a, it's more of a I'll see you off kind of, kind of approach, and it's the nose position. It's the, it's the angle of the head that actually gives you that very subtle difference in body language.

So let's look at that angle of head and head held high and some of these head positions, you know, they can be very, very similar, very subtle changes, but they, they, they tell you a different story. So this would be a neutral kind of head position like I said, the head is normally had held low, it's a low stress situation, low adrenaline. When a cow is antagonistic, that nose comes in, the pole comes out.

You can imagine if they're going to go head to head in a fight with each other, that's the way they're going to be. So slightly antagonistic will be this, highly antagonistic will be this, you know, they're going, going in for the charge. Picture number 4 shows that confident high head position.

And that is a little bit different to the number 6 alert. Head position And you might struggle to spot the difference, but if you look at the height of the pole of the head compared with the withers, you'll see the difference. So this is head held high confidence, but this is head held high with the pole higher than the withers and the nose is slightly tucked in.

The actual angle of the face is slightly different. And then number 5, I sort of left that left that one out a bit, his head very low, nose very far forward, pole of the forehead held back, and that would be a submissive. Body language.

So quite subtle differences like I say we those of us who used to work with cattle, we kind of, we we perhaps pick these signs up subconsciously, but it's nice to look at it consciously too. So low heads generally settled cow, e.g., eating, and they'll be chewing their cuds with heads on the on the low down as well.

When they're stressed, heads go up. Coming to tail position, normal, relaxed tail position, tail is very. Vertical, cold, ill, frightened or nervous, the tail is tucked in between the tail between the legs, a little bit like a dog, you know, if you imagine a nervous dog, feeling it's going to be punished, tail tucked in between its legs.

And then a kind of a threatening or highly curious or aroused, any of those things that are likely to result from high adrenaline, and the tail comes out and it will be swishing. So you know when a cow is sort of standing there, head held high, tail swishing, you don't want to be going too near that cow. She's feeling threatened and she may, she may, she may go for you.

So we can see this again. This one on the left here, the one my arrow is on, this hyper alert is pinned up. Tail swishing, head in a slightly threatening, manner, and of course she's got a calf with her, she's got a newborn calf with her and that's, that'd be normal maternal instincts to protect her calf.

Whereas this, look at the ear position here. Absolutely horizontal. Just alert, just trying to clock you, see where, see where, what you're doing, see what's going on, that very curious kind of, emotion that cows show.

The nose is forward, the pole is back. The nose is what she's leading with because cows. They rely heavily on the sense, the sense.

On, smell, the sensation of smell, to learn about the environment. So, you know, we all, you know, as human beings have a sense of smell, we have hearing and we have vision. Cows, they have much more sensitive hearing than a human being.

Their eyesight is. I was gonna say not as good, it's just, it's different. It's better than ours in terms of night vision.

They've got very, very good night vision. But it's poorer than ours in terms of acuity. It's better than ours in terms of field of view, but it's poorer than ours in terms of being able to judge distances because their eyes are on the side of their heads.

They have a very, they have a very, very small field of view, which is binocular vision. But their sense of smell will be many, many, many, many, many times better than the human beings. They, they, they use pheromones to communicate quite a lot.

They can probably smell fear. They can certainly smell a vet when they arrive on the farm way, way, way before they'll see the vet. So That's why they often lead with their nose.

Now I have a couple of, heroes in the world of stress-free cattle handling and, and I'll introduce you to my second one. So I mentioned Paul Hemsworth earlier on, Professor Paul Hemsworth Melbourne University. This is my second one.

Bud Williams. Who has no longer with us anymore, and he. Was a stock person, very well renowned stock person in North America.

Many of you will have heard of Temple Grandin. She's another one of my heroes in this area, and Bud Williams was Temple Grandin's mentor. And he has a few nice sayings, and this is what I'll introduce you to.

No matter how good you become at recognising cow signals, cows will always recognise your signals better and faster. And that's because they have these more sensitive senses, such as smell and hearing. And they are prey animals, so they have to, they have to be evolved to recognise threat and be very alert to predators and any threat.

So I'm going to move on to my second section now and look at The relationship between people and cattle and why attitude is everything. Coming back to Bud Williams again, another Bud Williams quote. If animals are left alone, they would live a very simple life.

When we own them, their life and the way they live is determined by us, and there is very little that will be simple when people are involved, I think we know that. He says, learn to like all of your animals every minute of every day. Just hold on to that concept because I'll come back to that with some work that Paul Hemsworth has done.

Learn to like all of your animals every minute of every day. Now Paul Hemsworth has done some work on On establishing, does it matter if we use swear words. When we speak to our cows.

Of course cows don't understand swear words. They don't understand English. And yet it does matter.

And it's simply because it is very difficult to use swear words in practise without changing the tone of our voice. And in addition to that, The language we use alters our behaviour. Not only is it reflected in the tone of our voice, but if we're kind of using swear words and we're using sort of that kind of more aggressive type of language, then Paul Hemsworth has found that it is associated with, whether it is the cause of, but it's definitely associated with different behaviour behavioural characteristics of the stock people.

So a person who is using that bad language is more like to have a negative culture, a negative attitude towards their animals, and therefore behave in a negative way. Creating these positive attitudes towards handling cattle. Are associated with positive contacts with cattle, and that positive context by that I mean petting.

I mean stroking, patting, cuddling, saying nice things, calling them darling, my babe, my lovely, whatever. Those are positive contacts. Those positive attitudes positive attitudes.

When we are using that petting and the use of positive words. And physical effort to handle. Animals in a Nice way Leads to a low stress environment and it actually feeds in then better to better cattle handling and it's a positive feedback loop because the stock person then behaves better as well.

Conversely, any Negative behaviours, so slapping, pushing, hitting. Feeds into poorer. Or more stress and, and poor outcomes in terms of, of, of cattle handling.

And again, going back, there is compelling evidence that the behaviour that stopped people influences the behaviour, the productivity, and the welfare of farm animals. So we need to try and work out how can we engender these positive attitudes. Paul Hemsworth, he spent a lot of time working out what were the common factors on these high stress dairy farms.

And he came to the conclusion that he didn't even need to visit the farm, so sorry, he was measuring high stress, low stress. One of the ways he uses to measure this is flight distance. So farms, there'll be some dairy farms where the cows have got large flight distances.

In other words, when a person gets within 3 metres, the cow will turn away and other farms where the flight distance will only be 1 or 2 metres or less. So you can walk right up to a cow before she turns away. Which of the farms have got the shorter flight distance.

He discovered that you don't need to visit the farm. You don't need to, you don't need to observe anything. You just need to ask one question.

And this was the question How do you feel about your job? And if the answer is I love it, That's associated with low stress farms, low stressed cows, and if the answer is I hate it, high stress cows. So if we know how people feel about their work, then we also know how they're likely to interact with their cattle.

The negative leap, of course, is that if we've got someone who is feeling unhappy in their work, and that of course might be things that they've carried from home, it might just be that they're not suitable to that particular environment, you know, some people are not, are not cut out to work on farms. It can be a tough job, and if you don't love it, you're likely to bring that baggage with you to your workplace and your work environment so you can have a poor attitude. At work that will feed into poor behaviour towards the cow that leads to more scared cows, that leads to poor and unpredictable behaviour from the animals, and then that's going to make your job satisfaction even worse.

There's a negative loop. However, if we can get the positive loop where we have improved stockmanship beliefs, stockpership beliefs, so we have people who enjoy working with cattle, they enjoy their jobs, and this is where farm owners can show a lot of leadership here because There's a lot of things that people can do to make better job satisfaction, just simple things like providing decent rest facilities, decent working hours, just looking after them from a . Just safety at work, all those kind of things and we don't see that enough probably on our farms because farms are evolving all the time to become more businesslike, but perhaps their people skills and their and their people management isn't just evolving at the same pace.

So a lot of farm business owners really can learn a lot in this, in this sector in terms of improved, improved people management skills. To improve job satisfaction, that feeds into improved stockmanship behaviour. That means that you get less fear in cows and that leads to better job satisfaction, a positive feedback loop, better profitability for the farm, better welfare, more production, easier work for everyone, and then that kind of feeds back to everyone enjoying their job and then having better attitudes towards their cattle.

And that's the, that's the cycle we need to try and work for. So I can leave with a bit of an open question, how can we engender the right attitudes? I've given you a few tips on how that might be, including things like looking after staff morale through working environment.

But there's other things as well, and training will be a big part of that. Can anyone learn to work with animals? And if yes, then what is required?

What are the ideal characteristics of a stock person? And can stop personship be taught? Are people just inherently good stop people, or can anyone do it?

Let's have a look at some of the some of those questions and what answers we have. Look at the evidence. So Temple Grandin, she's done a lot of work with people working in slaughterhouses, and looking at the stress levels, cortisone levels of cattle that go through slaughterhouses and trying to improve, handling, facilities.

And she Has she, she, she sort of concluded that 90% of people in slaughterhouses, they can be taught better cat, but there's always, there's always a few. There's always a 10% that can't, and those shouldn't be doing that work. They shouldn't be working with cattle.

There are 10% of people, she says, who just don't get it. Temple Grandin also says the ideal stock person is a confident introvert, so someone who's confident, so can be confident around the animals, and that's great because you know, to work with cattle safely and to use some of these stress-free stockmanship skills, it's important that the cattle does have respect for us. They see us as they see us as the leader of their group.

They, we can, we perhaps need to retain some of our predator characteristics in order to, to, to, to, to keep that respect. But not be too predatory. That we increase adrenaline.

So confident and the intimate bit will be someone who is, is quite happy in their own skin and maybe someone who's who's quite quiet and observes because that observation of the cattle behaviour really feeds into how they then behave. Paul Hemsworth, again, the guy from Melbourne, he states that teaching stock personship improves milk yields, and he's, and he's, some of his research work shows that, but not on all farms. Paul Hemsworth also states that training stock persons can reduce negative interactions by 50%, and that's.

Measuring by, taking video recording of, of, of stop personship behaviour and, and counting positive interactions and negative negative interactions. Neil Chesterton, he's, he's one of my next heroes that I've not introduced you to yet. Neil Cheston is a vet in New Zealand.

I've worked with Neil over many years, with foot health in reducing lameness. And he states that 75% of lameness in New Zealand is due to impatience of the stock person handlers. And this is mainly due to ignorance, and teaching stock personship skills, how to handle cows in the collection yard at milking in particular is a big one, reduces lameness.

And then Bud Williams again. If you prefer machines to animals, work with machines, and Bud Williams again, only keep the animals you like. So there is a role for stock personship training.

We are not born inherently good stock people or inherently poor stock people. I think that's a myth that we need to bust, because I think sometimes there can be a feeling that if you're not born into dairy farming or you're not born into farming, then, There's no place for you. And then on the other side of the coin there are some people who think, oh well, I've always been a farmer, you know, and my dad was a farmer.

I know how to handle stock and yet without training some of those people can be the worst. They can be the worst. I was at the total dairy conference in 2021, and the opening expert debate was meeting the challenges of the UK dairy industry, and the number one challenge that was identified by experts within the industry, so this is including dairy farmers themselves and farm business owners, was staff retention.

That is a huge challenge at the moment where we have a shrinking labour market, labour pool. And every dairy farmer I know at the moment, they will identify that getting, getting people to work on the farm, getting people to stay is one of their biggest challenges, not dissimilar to the veterinary profession. And again, providing training in stock personship and stress-free catf handling is very likely to be beneficial for the farmers and their cows and the people working with them and helping staff retention because people will enjoy it more.

So that's a little bit that we've covered off about how important it is to to create the right environment for good attitudes. Now we're going to come on to some very practical stuff, so practical stress free capital handling tips. And this is using several concepts.

The flight zone, which I mentioned earlier, balance points, pressure and release and wiggling. Let's go through them. So there are kind of 3 zones around the cow.

The first one, the biggest one is the awareness zone. This is probably 100 metres or more. If it's, if it's a suckler cow, it might be 200 metres.

Basically it could be whenever they clock you. That's their awareness zone. For a dairy cow, they may not actually sort of prick their ears up and actually turn towards you until you get a bit closer, maybe 50 metres, but it's a big, it's a big zone.

It's where the cow first clocks you. First notice is you. Moving further forwards and closer to the cow, we will get into.

The flight zone and that is the point at which she will turn away from you, not necessarily run away from you. If you're behaving, if you're measuring the flight zone in a very measured way, you'll be walking very slowly towards the nose of the cow and at the point where she turns away from you. That's the Edge of her flight zone and the edge of her flight zone is called the pressure zone.

So it's that kind of little boundary between the awareness zone and the flight zone, and finding the pressure zone is really important because this is where we want to be working. We want to be working on the pressure zone. Not in the flight zone.

So you establish your flight zone by practising a pressure and release, pressure and release, and this is where wobbling comes in. So remember cows, they're not that good at judging distance. They're moving our whole body rather than just flapping our arms around is far more effective at helping the cow judge where we are and what our movements are.

So flight distance, typical flight distance of a dairy cow is probably about 0.5 metre to 1.5 metres.

It's actually quite low, and this is how you measure it. You walk slowly but continuously, approximately 1 metre per second, so that's very, very slow, aiming for about 0.5 metre in front of the cow's nose not looking at her eye.

If you look at her eye, you'll increase the flight zone because she'll be feeling threatened by that. I'll come back to how, how we use that pressure zone just shortly, but before I do that, the next area to look at is balance points. And I just think this is like, it's almost like driving a remote control car.

I remember I had a remote control car when I was a little boy, you know, 10 or 12 year old, and my pride and joy, my remote control car and I spent hours driving it around the kitchen floor, using my remote controller left, right, back, back and go, and using our body. With the balance points is very, very similar to that. So left, right, stop and go.

There are 2 balance points on a cow. The first one is going from the nose to the tail down the midline, and simply we move to one side of that midline, the cow goes one way, and we move to the other side of that midline, and the cow goes the other way. So that's how we steer them.

Within their field of vision, if we're not in their field of vision, that won't work. The second balance point is the shoulder, point of the shoulder, and simply. If I have a cow here, if I kind of move in front of the point of the shoulder, the cow stops.

She won't necessarily go backwards, it might take a bit more pressure to make a cow go backwards. They don't like going backwards. But if I move behind the point of the shoulder, she goes forwards.

So it's kind of stop. OK. Stop.

Yeah And if you're working on the edge of the flight zone in the pressure zone, you can do this with cows. You can make them stop and go, stop and go, repeatedly and in a very controlled manner using those balance points. So bring that together a little bit.

The best place to stand is on the left hand side of the cow. That is because cows like to see any threat through their left eye. The left eye is attached to the right side of the brain, and apparently the right side of the brain is most associated with the fear centre, which is a.

Where they like to kind of process threat from a predator. So if we can try and stand on the left hand side of the cow, it's not an essential. I mean, if you can't stand on the left hand side of the cow for practical reasons, then don't, don't, don't stress about it.

But if you can stand on the left hand side of the cow, stand in her field of vision. And then establish where the pressure point is. So in her field of vision it's kind of all around the cow except the little bit at the back.

I think it's on my slide show that it doesn't show. I've got a slide that shows the blind spot but it's basically just behind the cow. This is just showing how if I move this man here in my picture moves forwards in front of the balance point here, the cow stops.

Move backwards, so past the balance point of the shoulder, the cow moves forwards. That's very important for helping cows flow into a milking parlour or down a race because certainly if you want cows to move down a race, the worst place you can stand is where my arrow is pointing here at the back of the last cow, because The speed at which cows move down that race, or whether they move at all, is governed by the cow in front. Cows are followers and leaders.

You need to have a lead cow leading and the other cows will follow, so you can put as much pressure on your like as that back cow here and the other cows will not move down that race. It will not work. So.

Basic human error will be standing here and shouting and hollering or tapping a stick or worse still, tapping the cow with a stick on the end of the race. That's poor stockmanship. It's going to raise adrenaline.

It's going to cause all sorts of problems, and it will not result in the desired outcome, which is the cows will keep moving down the race. So what you need to do is you come to the front of the race and you walk very gently at the at the pressure zone, so just at the edge of the flight zone, you walk very gently. Passing the balance points to the shoulders and as each shoulder balance point is passed, the cow moves forward.

So this first came moves forward first and then the second camera moves forward and the 3rd cam moves forward, and the cows will float nicely either into the hair and bone parlour or down the race, and then you come out of the pressure zone to loop back around again and do it again. This is the blind spot. If you're in the blind spot, she's going to turn one way or the other so that she can see you.

She won't go forwards, she's just going to turn around, and that's going to be very frustrating. I think farmers find that sometimes when they design their, their cattle handling races with a crush at the end and they're trying to push the cow into the crush, she doesn't want to go and it's because she can't see and they're going to want to turn around, so bad design. Come to the side, preferably on the left hand side.

Now if you're outside the, sorry, if you're outside the blind spot but working on the edge of the pressure zone. If you move towards the cow on her left hand side into that pressure zone, the cow moves forwards. Because you're behind a balance point of the shoulder.

If you continue to walk at your normal speed, you're going to encroach that. Flight zone and the cow will get stressed and then when they get stressed they do. Unpredictable things.

They either turn around, they run away, or they freeze, you know, that sort of freeze fight flight kind of thing. So you never want to be encroaching into the flight zone. You just want to work on the pressure zone.

So this is called pressure and release, pressure and release. You're going into the into the pressure zone and then back. You reward the movement with stepping out.

So you move forward, the cameras forward, and you reward that movement by stepping out. Press and release, press and release, press and release. Now that could be quite frustrating as a human being sort of moving backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards.

So how do you do that in reality? You use zigzag movements because that zigzag movement slows down your speed. You're always walking it, working on the pressure zone as the cow is moving forwards.

And it also allows the cow to Work out where you are better because her visual acuity is not as good as ours. We're all a bit blurry, I guess, the cows. And so if we're moving our whole body in that zigzag motion, then she can just gauge where we are a little bit better.

Do it all slowly. A typical cow walking speed is 2.5 kilometres an hour.

A typical human walking speed is 3.4 kilometres per hour. So moderate the speed.

I love this photo because this shows the perfect stop person to go and drive cows back along a track or a roadway to the parlour. So someone a little bit old with a walking stick, walking nice and slowly, standing on the left hand side of the cows. At the back outside the pressure zone, not putting pressure on the last cow in the, in the, in the group because they're leader followers.

The speed of that, the speed of that herd walking down that road is set by the cows at the front, not the cows at the back. So there's no point trying to speed them up. You won't be able to.

It's set by the leaders at the front and walk at 2.5 kilometres an hour. So nice and steady.

If you're doing it well, all the heads will be down, low stress. If you're not doing it well, the heads come up. So that's a nice way of measuring how you're doing.

Beware of panic. If heads are up, it means adrenaline. And cows don't learn when they've got adrenaline.

They have what's called thinking errors. I call them thinking errors in human beings as well. If you, if you're stressed, you don't think straight.

You're not using the logical part of your brain. So cows, they, they, they stop personship skills that I've just shown you previously using balance points and pressure zones, it does not work where you've got adrenaline. Adrenaline and panic is dangerous and it's common.

So summarising that, work on the edge of the flight zone, use pressure and release, reward forward movements by coming out of the flight zone or away from the pressure zone. Choose your position very carefully if you, if you can on the left, but always, always where the cow can see you and that's outside of the blind spot. Keep, step back and keep moving.

Use your wiggling, wobbling to move your whole body position, not your arms flapping around cause that's adrenaline inducing. Keep your hands in your pockets if you can. Use zigzag motion motion for the same reason that slows down your forward speed and also helps the cow see where you are.

Parallel walking, so that was that bit where you're loading cows up in a race and you walk in the opposite direction to the way the cows want to move. So you're passing the balance points on their shoulders so they know when to walk in the opposite direction. Moderate your speed and as I said just now, keep your hands in your pockets.

OK, moving on a little bit more. So this is section 4 of this webinar, this introductory webinar to the subject. I want to just talk a little bit about emotional states and avoiding emotional wrecks, cows and humans, but we're concentrating on cows.

Sometimes we can fall into a trap perhaps of anthropomorphism. We can sort of look at cows and we can perhaps project onto them some human characteristics and And, and, and what they might be thinking. So I'll do this just for a bit of fun on these two photographs.

If you look at the photograph on the left, you might see the cow that's just looked up and clocked you might be thinking, Hey, what are you up to? And this cow here is just thinking, Yum, yum, yum. I'm enjoying my grass.

And this cow here might be thinking, coming towards you, Oh, have you got something special for me? And a couple of seconds later, the cow that first looked up has lost interest, and she might be thinking, oh, boring, I'll carry on eating. This one might be thinking, oh, yum yum, yum, I'm enjoying my food, and this cow might be thinking, are you sure you've got nothing for me?

However, that's anthropomorphism because of course the cows won't be thinking those things. However, they will be having feelings, and this is where I think we are more safe to project similar feelings that we have onto the cow. So whereas cows may think differently to humans or humans think differently to cows, their feelings will be very similar, and there's good research evidence that feelings, the emotional states of mammals, is very, very similar to the emotional states of humans.

So what is she feeling? Different question to what is she thinking. Well, this cow is possibly feeling curious, calm, alert, certainly heads up, friendly.

She's probably not feeling angry, horny, sad, or anxious, and I think that's a fairly safe bet. What is this cow feeling? Well, she's possibly feeling pissed off, anxious, uncertain, in pain.

These are all feelings that we can relate to. She's probably not feeling enthusiastic, horny, or joyous. And it's a safe bet that actually the feeling, the actual emotional state will be very similar to what we know as emotional states.

So animals are emotionally very similar to people. Mammals Cognition is different. Language and rationalisation is a very human or a primate trait.

It's not to say that some mammals don't have a degree of that cognition, but it's not as well developed as primate, as the primate brain. So we must be careful not to anthropomorphize. It's unlikely that a cow will feel some of these complex feelings such as hatred.

It's unlikely that a cow takes revenge like in the same way as a human being might because they don't bear a grudge in the same way. And equally to some of the positive emotions or feelings that humans might have, such as sympathy, that cows probably don't feel in the same way. Animals are not all created equal, so some are domesticated animals such as cows, and they have very high sociability traits.

And therefore it's feasible that they are particularly tuned to things like separation anxiety. I'll just delve into that a little in a second with just an example of that. There's this kind of concept.

You may have come across it before. I, I'm introducing you to, I think this is my last hero in stress-free cattle handling that I'm going to refer to today. I think he's the last one I refer to, and that is a guy called Jack Panksepp.

Again, he's no longer with us, but he did a lot of his research work on. Emotional states and He worked with this concept, as other people have done as well, that you have. The brain has evolved so that in an evolutionary sense, the very primitive brain that we share with reptiles and more basic animals, I guess, is this reptilian brain it's coined as.

That would be the brain stem. So is that the Mulla? Cerebellum I'm sure that I'm not sure why the other features and brands them are I'm afraid.

We, this is essential for life, the brain stem, and we can survive without our other parts of the brain. So you know, these, these are the basic, the parts of the brain that, that, that sort of govern. Basic things like breathing.

And the basic senses. So this is a brain stem where you feel hot, cold, and pain, hunger, thirst. That's brain stem stuff, reptilian brain, primitive brain.

Then you have the subcortical brain, which is coined as the mammalian brain. So, anatomically, where this is, this is your mammalian brain, your subcortical brain is kind of in the roof of your mouth. If you're sort of sticking a drill bit in above the roof of your mouth, you'd be going into your, into your mammalian brain, I guess, your subcortical brain.

And this would include the thymus, the hypothalamus, the, not thymus, thalamus, hypothalamus, pituitary, Nucleus accumbens is a region of that midbrain, that subcortical brain. Can't remember the other anatomical regions, but, there's a few other. Parts and this is where we have our emotional feelings and we share our subcortical brain very similarly to cows.

They would have a very similar subcortical brain to us and therefore it's reasonable to suggest that their feelings, their basic emotional feelings are very similar to ours. So this would include care, panic, play. There are 7 basic emotional states which Jack Pankett refers to associated with specific regions of that subcortical brain.

I'll, that's my next slide, the 7, the 7 basic emotional states. And then we have our primate brain. This is the cortex.

This is the, this is the, the bit behind our forehead, the bit that's very well developed in, in primates and humans. It's where we do our cognition. It's where we, it's where we, this part of the brain we use for our language, our rationalisation, and more complex feelings such as hatred, jealousy, empathy, and sympathy.

So the seven primal emotions, according to Jack Panksepp, which are felt in the subcortical mammalian brain, are seeking rage, fear, lust care, panic, and play. So there are 4 positives and 3 negative emotions. The positive ones are in green and the negative ones are in purple.

And the effective feelings, i.e. The descriptor for those primary emotions would include enthusiastic.

So if you're in that, that curiosity mode, it's, it's. Actually how we feel it, we might feel it is enthusiasm. That's actually what it feels like is enthusiasm.

Now all of these 7 primary emotions, I'll, I'll, I'll just list the others in a second, but just, just, just take a pause here. These 7 primary motions are. Evolutionary Quite valuable if cows had evolved without having seeking curiosity, in other words.

Then possibly they might have died out as a species because you need curious cows and you need a degree of curiosity for them to extend their territory if they're running out of food, for example. Rage, the feeling is pissed off or cross. That's why I use the word pissed off when I was looking at those photographs of the cows earlier because it's, it's kind of the effective feeling of the emotion of rage, .

If you didn't have rage, I guess you wouldn't be able to protect your young if it was under threat. So cows would have evolved to have a degree of feeling cross. Fear, well, the feeling is scared.

I think we know what scared feels like. Again, I guess if cows didn't feel fear, they'd be falling off cliffs because they'd be. Going over the edge all the time as an example.

Lost? Well, that's horny, that's why I used the word horny when I was looking at those photographs earlier. There was a reason for my madness of picking that one out.

. Evolutionary, obviously, if cows never felt, horny, they probably wouldn't breed. So, you know, that's a, a, a, a feeling again that we can share. We know what that feels like to feel that, to feel that feeling.

Care, that's the tender and loving feeling. So this is particularly associated with maternal love and again evolution would be important because it means that you've got a bond between mom and mom and daughter, mom and son, which is really important for nurturing the baby calf. But it's also very important that care feeling, that tender and loving feeling, is important for creating social groups because there are families of cows within a larger group and they will groom each other and they'll have that tender feeling towards each other.

Panic Well, Jack Pasek calls it panic, but it's kind of the feeling of this will be lonely and sadder and anxious. I also think it includes the feeling of grief. Grief is a very tangible feeling.

Cows feel grief, we feel grief. It's probably feels very similar and it's the primary emotion is, Jack Pankse terms it as panic. And then finally play.

Well, we know what play feels like. That's a happy feeling, joyous. Now some of those are rewarding.

The green ones are positive and some are punishing. So evolutionary, you know, some of those things have helped us evolve in a positive way, and some things have kept us safe, if that makes sense. So curiosity is reward, a rewarding emotion.

Hence you're going to seek more food, go into different territories. That's a rewarding emotion, whereas fear keeps you, keeps you safe, keeps you away from danger. Let's look at a couple.

So panic, is exemplified by this photograph of a, of a little child who presumably has just been put down by mum. And that feeling that I think we can probably associate with that separation anxiety is a feeling that will be common to cows and be common to calves as well. Sorry, common to us as well.

OK. This separation anxiety that Jack Paet caused panic is an example of mental pain. It's not a nice feeling.

It's, it's not pain in the sense of a physical pain like putting a hot pin in the back of your hand, but it's no, it's no less unpleasant. It's a mental plane. Mental pain and it's an antecedent to depression in humans.

So I show you a picture here of a calf on its own. Is up, which is a high anxiety trait, high anxiety body language. And Separation anxiety is likely to be similar to separation anxiety in children, separation anxiety calves, and it's just one other compelling reason not to rear carves into individual pens, please.

So that panic arousal has been studied in various ways, and Jack Panseki again has studied this in chicks. So panic arousal may be the main source of mental pain which promotes depression is, is, is what he hypothesised. And if you take a separated baby bird, as soon as they like this one here, if they're out of the nest, they squawk and they display panic, but as soon as they find the mother's wings, they settle down and they're comfortable.

And you can simulate that by holding the little birds in our hand. They'll settle down. And Jack Pasek has studied this, and he calls it contact comfort, and it's it's common to All mammals, all mammals like contact comfort, and that touch, that contact alleviates that mental pain, and the effect is chemical and it's due to brain opioids that are released.

That contact comfort, that holding releases brain opioids. Is why we cuddle our children. And it's why we need to pet our calves and our cows.

Cows would do it themselves. If they wouldn't have, we didn't have human beings there, they, they do groom each other and they certainly groom their baby calves, but we need to also clock onto that, that we are a source of brain opioids if we pet our animals and if we give them contact comfort. It's a positive thing.

You see it with newborn calves. So touch and physical contact stimulates the release of opioids in the calf's brain. That's A definite that happens.

So when the mum is licking the baby calf, then it would increase the brain opioids, so it calms the calf down. Meanwhile, You get a maternal instinct of care and loving, nurturing the nurturing feeling in the cow, and that's associated with oxytocin release. So those two, that emotive feeling of care and nurturing is associated with oxytocin, sometimes called the love hormone.

And that again reduces. Anxiety, it calms the cow down and it helps to release her milk as well, which is good. Now unfortunately we in the dairy industry, the whole dairy industry works really by taking calves away very quickly after after birth, and there is a strong argument, and I am an advocate of this, of removing the calves as soon as possible because it helps reduce disease, but it also reduces the degree of separation anxiety later on.

So if you leave the calf on, say, for 24 hours, you get a greater degree of separation anxiety when you do remove the calf. So it's better to remove the calf when it's. First born, you get a reduced separation anxiety.

But how can we do that? In a kind and compassionate way. Well, here's a concept which is from cow signals.

So cow signals is another resource if you like, which I refer to in this in this stress free training, and it's called the pamper pen and cuddlebox concept. So basically a calving cow is in the pamper pen, which could be looked after very well, and the cuddle box is where you place the newborn calf so that the cow can lick the calf, releasing the brain opioids to the calf, releasing her oxytocin, and that. In an ideal world, let's go back to that slide, is when you harvest the colostrum because you get very good milk let down and very, very good high quality colostrum.

So that's the pen cuddle box complex concept, and I see this more and more now on dairy farms. It's great to see because I think it's, it's, it's, it's using our Imagination and, careful thought to improve the welfare of Our animals on our farm and improve the outcome. You get better colossum absorption when you get high brain opioids, so you get better calf health as well.

It's another compelling reason why we should be feeding our colostrum by teat and not by stomach tubing. Stomach tubing should be a last resort, not the standard protocol for all calves born. We need to backtrack on that, folks, because I'm guilty of being a dairy vet in the industry for many, many years, and I've been promoting well it doesn't matter promoting good colostrum transfer by saying to the farmers, it doesn't matter how that colostrum gets into the calf, just make sure it gets its 10% of body weight within the 1st 6 hours of life and make sure it gets good quality colostrum.

And the safest way of doing that perhaps for many big farms is to stomach you because they know they've had it. However, if that is the default for all calves, we're kind of missing sight of the bigger picture here. I don't think that's an acceptable way to introduce a newborn calf, a sentient being to this world is by putting a stomach tube down its mouth to administer 3 litres of Colostrum.

As a backup, yes, but not as the prime method on a farm of feeding our colostrum. If it is done correctly, you will get very, very good success rates, in other words, in excess of 95%. Of feeding the required amount of colostrum by teat.

And the tricks for this, if you want to know the success factors. The wetter the better. The calf has to be absolutely brand new born.

If it's had the chance of suckling the mum's teat, it's, it's gonna be a lot harder. So really, Being there at the birth Drying the calf off by using a cuddle box to allow the calf, the calf to lick, so the calf lick its calf. But then immediately feeding that colossum while the calf is, let's say only half an hour old, you're going to get good success.

Second success factor, using the right teat, peach teats, what I recommend. Third success factor is ensuring the colossum is warm. The 5% of calves that might need stomach tubing are those that have had a difficult carving, so they're a little bit weak, or those that have, you didn't get too soon enough.

They're too old, and they might have drunk a little bit from the mother's teeth and you don't quite know how much they've had, probably not a full amount. There is some evidence. It's, it's ambiguous, but there is some evidence that shows that calves that drink their coloss through a teat.

If everything else is the same costs quality, cost from volume, timing, etc. Is all the same, they will absorb their antibodies more effectively. In other words, they have a better apparent efficiency of absorption than calves that have it administered by a stomach tube.

Jack Panksepp and others have done further work in some of this mental pain. And sadness And The effect of brain opioids, and there is some evidence that depression is associated with low brain opioids and some evidence that that can be alleviated by some opioids such as buprenorphine to release depression in humans. There was research in 2013, so there's evidence of low intensive suicidal feelings.

So again, use that evidence to try and think, well, how can we increase our brain opioids in our own cows? And that is including things like pair rearing. Calves, making sure that they can be mates with each other.

It's increasing the evidence for stroking and petting our calves and cows, providing sufficient space for co-grooming and social activity, and definitely avoiding separation, avoiding separation anxiety. Cows don't like it. Another emotion we'll look at is fear.

Fear is associated with high adrenaline. When a hood becomes under pressure, they become afraid and when afraid, they're more difficult to handle and fear spreads. A dominant cow can make less dominant cows feel afraid.

Adrenaline, it takes about 30 seconds to settle down. So the best thing you can do is if you've got high fear in a herd. Go and have a cup of tea.

Let it settle. So the arousal level of the herd, because it is a herd level, the arousal level of one cow seems to spread to the others. They're either all asleep or grazing or walking around, or they might be playing or they might be very frightened or in fight or flight.

Frightening one animal increases the rise of the whole herd. So individuals and the entire herd have characteristics including how readily it becomes aroused or fearful. Examples which cause high adrenaline or fear include too much noise.

Cows are very sensitive to high-pitched noises or any loud noises, fast movement. For example, coming out of the pit, during milking time, not respecting the flight distance or balance points of the cows, standing at the entrance of the pit, all this increases fear. Hitting cows, that's a big no no.

Rushing, fast movements, angry voices, use of electric codes, a big no no, slippery floors, lack of routine like cows like consistency, dogs, all of these things are to be avoided. Note how many of them are attributed to human behaviours, most of them. I'm just gonna fast forward this cos .

It's stuff that if you were interested in this in more detail, then you're very welcome to join me for some more detailed. Detailed training on this area, but I'm just going to fast forward if you don't mind on those little bits because we're running out of time now. So lots of other stuff on the emotions and a little bit more evidence on how we can use those primary emotions in our work.

Just the final thing I leave you with the with the emotions is that This graphic equaliser analogy and all animals differ. A little bit on how strong they feel emotions. There is a thought that cows have very high curiosity levels, higher perhaps in human curiosity.

They're very, very, very sort of high on their graphic equaliser. And then within the, within a species within the cows, you get some cows that are more curious than others, and I referred to this earlier on as well. Some animals and cow domesticated cows, for example, are very social.

They have been socialised. They've been bred. Selected for, for being domesticated and it is possible that they are kind of high on their graphic equaliser for this panic emotion.

Separation anxiety is more likely to be a risk for a domesticated cow than it is for some other animal species. Possibly cats don't feel separation anxiety in the same extent that a cow would. So being aware of that.

So I'll leave you with my acknowledgements. Neil Chesterton, Vett Education Transfer Services from New Zealand. He's the guy who talks a lot about cow flow, and stockmanship behaviour around that, in particularly with foot health.

Temple Grandin. Livestock behaviour consultant and author, done a lot of work around cattle handling systems. The cow signals guys Duke Dreessen and Jaan Holson, they advocate for the cuddlebox pamper pen concept.

Professor Paul Hemsworth from Melbourne, Australia referred to him quite a few times. Professor Jack Panksepp, neuroscientist and psychobiologist, so Ired to him at the end in some of his primal emotions, and then Budd Williams, stock person, rancher, and observer and teacher of cattle behaviour. I hope you've enjoyed today.

It's been a little bit of a whistle stop tour, and I feel I kind of just scratched the surface in this hour. It's a much deeper subject than than I have gone into, but I've kind of give you a broad feel touching on some practical aspects of cattle handling such as using pressure points, balance points, etc. Touching on some of the neuroscience, the emotional states, and touching on some of the physiology, why stress causes poorer production.

If you are interested in learning more and if you are interested in learning ways to help teach this to others, particularly farmers that you work with, then you are very welcome to join me for an in more in-depth small group online training. If you want to learn more about that. Load up this QR code on the top, and that takes me will take you to my website where you can learn information on CPD on stress-free cattle handling and cow flow.

As a full day online course, small group discussion based training. If you would like a resource that you can share with your farmers on Working safely with livestock, then click on the bottom QR code and that takes you to some farming connect resources that I developed at the end of last year which again covers some of the basic stuff we've done today in terms of where to stand pressure points, wiggling, wobbling. Balance points, etc.

So you're very welcome to look at those, but other than that, I'll stop sharing the screen, just say my My, farewells. I hope you've enjoyed it. There is more to this than Meets the eye and certainly more to it than I've covered today.

But thank you very much for your attention.