Drawing Eyes on Cow Butts May Ward Off Hungry Lions | Hacker News Reader

Drawing Eyes on Cow Butts May Ward Off Hungry Lions

gizmodo.com

54 pointsourmandave31 comments

> The African lion is a vulnerable species, with numbers dropping from over 100,000 in the 1990s to between 23,000 and 39,000 today, according to the Botswana Predator Conservation Trust (BPCT). Much of that decline is due to these kinds of retaliation killings because farmers have no non-lethal strategies for protecting their herds.

The root of the problem is animal agriculture. We see similar dynamics in the United States, where wolves, coyotes, and even wild horses are culled to protect cattle.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/gover...

https://www.thedodo.com/why-is-the-government-killing-the-la...

If you asked the farmers, they might tell you that the root of the problem is that there are so many lions.

Who's better off, the farmers in Africa contending with lions, or the farmers in France who wiped out their lions long ago?

>farmers have no non-lethal strategies for protecting their herds

I assume there's a good reason, but why not fences? Isn't chain-link fence really cheap?

These farmers dont have land for grazing the cattle graze in the wild.

- Chainlink fence cheap

No, not cheap even by western standards.

Probably cost swaps labour for material when going from rich to poor. But not cheap.

> stamping eyes on one-third of a herd of 62 cattle. When the cattle returned each night, they took a head count to see how many had survived. Only three cows were killed by lions during this period—all without the painted eyes on their rumps. And all the painted cows survived.

This is really cool work! And fantastic that they are using a rigorous approach to study this.

Getting more data will be important. I calculate a P value of 0.23, giving a pretty big possibility that they're finding results this extreme (0% of cattle lost from the eye group vs 7% of cattle lost from the no eye group) by chance.

Similar tricks have been tried it with tigers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_attacks_in_the_Sundarban... Apparently tigers figure it out fast enough.

If fake eyes on butts are so useful, why didn't they evolve by themselves?

Humans bred cows, they did not evolve.

Nature's cows (buffalo etc.) live in very, very large herds for protection.

Darwin had a term for this, selective breeding or artificial selection

Pedantic: cattle (cows be females).

The aurochs didn't really live in large herds. It was just huge and cranky, and had big horns.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs

It's always nice, if you're going to go around saying "pedantic:", to have what you say afterward be correct.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cow

It seems that no mammal has developed this strategy, at least for defense purposes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyespot_(mimicry)

Many animals do. But not all animals evolve the same strategies.

Something I've wondered about for awhile: why aren't there any animals that have an extra set of functional eyes on their backside? (I don't mean having eyes on either side of the head). Why isn't panoptic vision a thing?

Interesting, I guess the computations are expensive enough that the extra food required isn't worth the survival advantage.

Or not enough time has passed yet. Give it another billion years.

Maybe having eyespots in weird places would deter potential mates? That would be a pretty powerful evolutionary incentive to just not have something that weird back there.

I wonder how this will affect the cattle's mating. Cattle don't do missionary; I wouldn't be surprised if eye contact totally kills the mood for a bull.

There would be no eye contact when the bull has mounted.

But would he even try to mount while he can see "eyes"? Or, would he try to manoeuvre around to the other side, after a little misguided foreplay?

I love when making situations better involves almost ridiculously simple - but "outside the box" - solutions. Not every problem has a technology-based solution. This made me smile wide :)

KISS - Keep it simple stupid.

Maybe not every problem has a technology-based solution, but apparently this one did. :)

This is the fundraiser from earlier this year:

https://experiment.com/projects/i-cows-can-intimidating-eye-...

If all the cows have eyes on their butts, won't the lions just get more hungry and then eat them anyway?

I suspect they would eventually figure out that's eyes on cows are harmless. Painting the cows with camo pattern would probably also make the Lions nervous, for a while at least.

Okay, now try it with angry eyes.

sometimes evolution isn't fast enough

Does it work on people butts too?

Well, apparently, with respect to another big cat, tigers, on the backs of their heads, it does, or people believe, over in the sunderbans[1]. Same idea. See fifth image of the lot.

[1]http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-26064591

> The inspiration for the iCow strategy came while Jordan was based in a village in Botswana, when two lionesses were killed by local farmers in retaliation for preying on their cattle herds.

Letting lions starve to death is the only way to save them from angry peasants!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com