The Psychology of Cows - Commentary Response

Abstract

We are grateful for the thoughtful commentaries on our targeted review paper: The Psychology of Cows. These responses added important knowledge, insights, and analyses that greatly extended the discussion that we attempted to seed on the social, emotional, and cognitive complexity of cows. This review paper was, as King noted in her response, an "invitation to dialogue" about scientific knowledge of cows as complex sentient beings. We agree with King that this undertaking perhaps has latent challenges due to the cultural context in which it is embedded. In particular, we concur with several of our commentators, that the ubiquity of consumption and economic use of cows and the powerful ideology surrounding it has long shaped empirical inquiry and reactions to it. We acknowledge that we are attempting to summarize the psychological complexity of individuals whose bodies are a source of significant palate pleasure and profit. Americans consumed 24.8 billion tons of beef in 2015 (USDA ERS, 2017), and the beef industry in the US alone is worth the retail equivalent of over 105 billion dollars per year (USDA ERS, 2017). We appreciate King's recognition that we presented a comprehensive analysis of the literature on cows and did not succumb to "cherry-picking" favorable results. More importantly King acknowledges the widespread objectification of cows and other farmed animals even among other scientists, and that objectification leads to inhumane treatment. Andrews underscores the dearth of non-applied research by noting the need for additional research that relates to personhood and moral consideration for cows. For example, she noted that, missing from the current cow data, are investigations of moral agency, in the form of data on cooperation, obedience to authority, guilt behaviors, mutualism, reciprocity, and solidarity behaviors. Additional data, she notes, could also strengthen our understanding of self-awareness, rational problem-solving, and autonomy in cows. We fully agree. All of these areas are valuable for ethicists to evaluate moral consideration of cows utilizing her model of a personhood stereotype. But as we found in our review paper, experiments on cows have largely been related to maximizing production and profit, or, only in some cases, to improve welfare, a point also noted by Nawroth and Langbein. We recognized early on that the existing literature on cow behavior and cognition is biased toward applied themes. But, rather than simply summarizing the applied data, we structured the paper to hold the space for questions beyond it. We were not attempting to introduce bias, but to make explicit the bias that already exists but is currently denied. Our review paper had several goals: to bring to the scientific discourse the available evidence on cow complexity, and to juxtapose it alongside questions for its ethical implications; to combine fragmented empirical data into a coherent whole that represents the