By Justin Ammon
Mississippi Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station
From Cattle Today.
Vann said anxious, aggressive cows, or those with a pen score of 4 or 5, present a host of problems.
“They become sick more often, have more difficulty gaining weight and damage farm equipment. Their rowdy behavior rubs off on cows that would otherwise be perfectly calm,” Vann said. “Cow behavior even affects meat tenderness, as certain hormones such as cortisol and enzymes remain at higher levels in stressed-out cattle, possibly toughening the muscle.
All of these problems directly affect a cattle producer’s profit margins.”
Vann said the primary factor relating to cow behavior is genetics. If a high-strung bull and a wild female mate, the result will be a high-tempered calf.
But genes do not tell the whole story. Vann said a calf’s mother usually influences its behavior more than the bull, since the mother raises the animal and provides a constant presence.
However, Vann said that all cattle are susceptible to learned behavior.
“I’d say how humans treat the animal is 25 percent of it, followed by 10 percent being the environment,” she said. “The rest would be genetics; however, we are still investigating what makes some animals more aggressive than others.”
Danny Martin, the 2009 Mississippi Cattleman of the Year, owns a ranch in Raymond and can attest to these findings from experiences with his own herd.
“Ill-tempered cows have to get antibiotics more often, and they don’t come up to eat with the rest of the cows and get the proper nutrition,” he said.
Martin said he once sent several cows to a feed lot experiment at MSU, including one that was irritable.
“When I sent the cattle, there was no more than a 50-pound difference between each of them,” Martin said. “However, when the animals returned, the ill-behaved steer weighed 966 pounds, while all the others weighed over 1,200 pounds each.”
According to the study, which was published in the “Professional Animal Scientist,” cattle with high pen scores typically incurred higher medical expenses than lower-scoring cattle.
In addition, ill-tempered cattle typically bring in $5 or $6 less per hundred pounds of body weight than do calmer animals, Vann said. An aggressive cow weighing 800 pounds may net $480 less than its non-aggressive counterpart. However, high scorers usually won’t even reach that weight since they have trouble gaining bulk.