I recently spent a month at a beef ranch in the Dominican Republic for a field ecology course. This post is the result of an hour of focal animal sampling—a method of observing animal behavior—in one of the many pastures on site.
Why did I do this?
I have no idea what it’s like to be a cow on a ranch. Everything I know about life in the wild is second-hand, and I find it hard to imagine anything between free, happy animals frolicking in their untouched habitats and terrifyingly grim predation events. I worry that I feel bad for wild animals in way that seems too abstract, and I wanted to have more proximate interactions that would help me recalibrate.
Epistemic status: I had originally intended to spend 10 hours on this but could only spend one. This significantly limits the scope of the interactions I witnessed. Things I think are important that I missed: mother-calf interactions, sound recordings (slurps when drinking water, sound of grass being ripped out), and tracking where the cows direct their attention. The results of my observations were mundane, so I don’t expect this to be very interesting to read. However, I do think the mundaness is important.
Site and Transcripts
These were beef cattle, so the calves were not separated from their mothers. The condition of the pasture was quite good. It seemed like they rotate grounds frequently and none of the plots were overgrown.
Here are behavioral transcripts from ~3 o’clock in the afternoon. I had climbed into the pasture and sat at the edge to record these observations. Each cow had an ID tag near its ear, and I will refer to them with this number.
At this point there are no cows on my side of the pasture that I can observe well so I climb out of the pasture and walk to a further end of the same pasture. I’m looking at new cows now, all white in color. There are some others—15, 17, 65—that drift in and out of my line of sight.