Did you know that, like humans, cows have best friends? This adorable Instagram post explains that cows are known to choose “best friends” and panic when separated from them. Although they are often stereotyped as unintelligent, cows actually possess high emotional intelligence and exhibit complex social behaviors.
How Do Cows Choose Best Friends?
Cows are extremely curious creatures.
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Cows can live in herds that range widely in size, and in some commercial operations, herds may include up to 300 cows or more. In addition to bonding with the herd as a whole, cows will often pick one “best friend” within the group to stick close to. Like humans, cows form friendships based on shared personality traits. For example, a more timid cow might gravitate toward the shyer cows in the herd, while more social cows get along best with their extroverted peers.
Once they establish such bonds, cows will often groom each other and even cuddle up to sleep together. Before long, it becomes pretty obvious who’s “buddied up” in a herd. Because cows are highly emotional creatures, their bonds go deeper than the instinctual, safety-based connections that many animals form.
The Daily Mail reported that a 2011 study by Krista McLennan, then a PhD student at the University of Northampton, also found that a cow’s stress level significantly decreased when the animal was near its “preferred partner.” According to McLennan’s research, cows often choose one friend to stay close to.
Are Cows Emotionally Intelligent?
Though many assume cows are unintelligent, they’re actually incredibly smart.
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Yes, cows are emotionally intelligent creatures who form strong memories and intimate social bonds. They are also extremely sensitive, which may explain why they tend to panic when separated from their “best friends.”
In fact, research published in the journal Animal Behavior and Cognition found that cows display signs of emotions via indicators like eye white percentages and heart rates. Such signs can connote different personality traits, ranging from timidity to boldness, according to study authors Lori Marino and Kristin Allen.
Marino and Allen noted that most people assume cows lack individual personalities and maintain only simple social relationships. However, scientific literature indicates that cows actually possess complex cognitive, emotional, and social characteristics.
“Through dominance hierarchies and affiliative bonds, they have demonstrated knowledge about conspecifics and of their own social interactions with them,” Marino and Allen wrote.
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