Fake Cows and Real Ones

This post contains some reflections on a field ecology course I took in the Dominican Republic in January 2025. Our field site was a working beef ranch in Jarabacoa, a mountain town in the central region of the country.

I. Death in a Dominican Field

When I was a kid, I used to catch bees in my front yard with a mason jar. I would wait patiently by the flowerbed and just as they alighted, I would place a jar over them. I remember that they would fly frantically for a moment, then they’d calm down, and I’d look at them for a few minutes before letting them go. I don’t remember being that curious about bees. I just thought it was fun to catch them.

In January, as I watched my friends catch Dominican anoles by their tails and collect insects in vials, I thought of the bees. It looked fun! So cool and aesthetic; becoming of an ecologist.

I took a vial and stalked the field like a street marketer trying to find someone to talk to. I picked a completely uninteresting black insect, sitting on a blade of grass. I started to lower the vial onto the blade. I don’t know if the insect moved or if I was off-center, but I put the vial down really fast so it wouldn’t fly away and as I did that, the lip of the vial crushed its body. It slid down the blade and into the depths of the grass. Not slo-mo like in the movies, but quickly, like...real life.

I sat there for a moment because the time-scale separation was so jarring. It had taken me years to build up my beliefs about animal welfare. I had so carefully thought through and fretted over these ideas. In contrast, its small body blunted so quickly under the impact. A moment of curiosity and sloppiness, and it was dead.

II. Contact

One afternoon, I tried to build a mental model of what it’s like to a be a cow at the ranch. I (roughly) used an approach called focal animal sampling (FAS), in which you record an individual animal’s behaviors on an interval. I found it to be a really moving and thought-provoking experience.

Six months later, I showed the behavioural transcripts (see Appendix) to some friends. The responses ranged from “it’s like poetry” to “ngl…they seem kind of robotic.” A lot of the dimensionality had been lost in the retelling. 

Take, for instance, this excerpt (the cows had number tags): 

Cow 103 looks at me and moves away with her rear now facing me.

What is this even describing? I wouldn’t have a clue if I were you. If I put aside conventions in behavioral ecology for a moment, I’d say:

Cow 103 turned around and walked away as soon as I crawled into the pasture. She didn’t seem scared, so she was probably annoyed? Within 10 min all the cows moved deeper into the pasture, away from me. They probably don’t like having humans in with them. I should not have climbed into the pasture with them.

And where to begin with this one?

Cow 65, a new cow that moved in from the right, drinks from the water trough and has a small poop while it’s walking toward me. We make eye contact for 50 seconds. 65 breaks eye contact. Then she makes another 20 seconds of eye contact. Then she takes two steps closer to me and continues to direct her attention fully towards me while trough water drips from her mouth. She now is extremely close to the barbed wire I am standing behind, ~2.5 arms lengths away. I take two small steps closer to cow 65, and she continues to stare back without moving. Finally, she looks down and bends her neck through the barbed wire to eat some small ferns and bush leaves on the other side of the enclosure.

Which I’d translate to:

I’ve never had a staring competition with a cow (or any non-human) before! It was awesome. She seemed so curious and cautious. Her irises were huge compared to mine; there was so little white space in the corner of her eye. She didn’t close her mouth while looking at me, so there was a near constant flow of water and saliva dripping from her mouth. It wasn’t immediately clear to me why she stared for so long. But she eventually stuck her neck through the barbed wire and started nibbling a plant. It seemed like a special plant, because I didn’t see any in the field, and I can’t think of why else she’d risk approaching me.

There are ~1 billion cows in the animal agriculture system. The numbers are big, and the world is vast. Abstraction feels hopelessly inadequate. Watching nine cows swatting fleas and grazing on the slopes of Jarabacoa gave me something real to care about, but I cannot transmit the care and knowledge I gained to you.

III. Touching Grass

Suffering is a nebulous concept prone to abstraction. It's easy to get caught up in conversations about "suffering" while being unable to pin the term down. When I try to imagine what it's like to be a cow, I find that I don't have a picture of real cows. Instead, I have a stereotyped picture of very alien and tormented fake cows.

This problem reminds me of Joe Carlsmith’s Fake thinking and real thinking. The first issue is that my image of animal suffering was formed by cognitive processes, by thinking a lot about it. This is a problem because the image isn’t of a real sufferer: it’s bits and pieces of talks I’ve heard, moral weights, documentaries, videos, pictures, conversations with friends, biological understanding, and emotions stitched together. This theoretical knowledge is not the same as a real memory. Crucial details and metadata are missing. Put simply, it’s akin to the difference between losing a loved one and knowing that losing a loved one is devastating but not understanding why or how. Second, all of the above properties make it more effortful to conjure the image of suffering and harder for animal welfare considerations to occur to me while making important decisions.

While I don’t think a theoretical model will prevent me from doing good work advocating for animals in general, here are some examples of what I think goes wrong:

• I find it harder to care about individual animals. There seems to be a difference between theoretical notions of care and the real felt sense of care that comes from experiencing, the latter being much stronger.
• Something trivial (e.g. too lazy to take the spider out of the bathtub) or even curiosity (e.g. the story I told in part I) prevails over welfare considerations, ultimately causing harm or death. The experience of interacting with the animal doesn’t immediately summon the care that I would hope to respond with. It’s more like I’m floundering with the real life version of an exercise I saw in a textbook.
• When I hurt an insect, my first thought is “what does this say about me as someone who cares about animal welfare?” instead of “this must have been very painful for the insect”
• Caring about animals primarily because they are victims of abuse.

I'm not quite sure what to make of this. Does how we formed our beliefs about animal welfare influence how those beliefs function in practice? The specific risk I feel worried about is whether a theoretical notions of care can be brittle to contact with real animals. If so, maybe touching grass can help.

Many thanks to Dave Banerjee, Tara Fjellman, Jared Winslow, Jayisha Dhargawe, and Dominic Sobhani for their thoughtful conceptual and writing feedback.

Appendix

Here are behavioral transcripts from ~3 o’clock in the afternoon. Each cow had an ID tag near her ear, and I will refer to them with this number.

• Four cows within view. Cow 103 is closest to me and I can’t see the tags of the others. Cow 103 is white with bumpy skin and has fleas hovering around her back. The tags are attached through the middle of the ear, like piercings. The cows I see look well fed. The plots are not overgrown. In the distance, I see a calf with her mother.
• Cow 103 looks at me and moves away with her rear now facing me.
• The pasture is completely silent except for ripping and chewing of grass. I can hear them ripping grass from very far away (~300 ft?).
• I notice that their tails swat very high. Cow 103 moves near cow 91. Cow 91 is dark brown. They are neck and neck now. Cow 103 takes 3 steps forward.
• Cow 91 lifts her tail to swat mosquitoes.
• Cow 103 swats. Cow 103 takes 2 steps forward. Cow 103 and cow 91 move forward 7 steps together.
• Cow 103 is an impatient cow! She moves another 7 steps away.

At this point, I decided to move to a different section of the pasture. This section had five new cows now, all white in color. There were also some others—15, 17, 65—that drifted in and out of my line of sight.

• Cow 75 is closest to me. Cow 10 to the right and further right, Cow 73 behind cow 10.
• Cow 10 scratches her neck, first on right then left, with her mouth.
• Cow 73 pees. It was...big! It lasted ~5 seconds?
• Cow 75 scratches her leg and makes eye contact with me. She turns around 30 degrees but doesn’t step away. Cow 75 struggles to pull grass out at this spot and makes multiple attempts until she succeeds.
• Cow 75 makes prolonged eye contact with me for ~50 seconds, then scratches her right leg with the side of her mouth. The sound is rough, like sandpaper.
• Cow 10 takes 3 steps forward, scratches her leg, and swats flies.
• Cow 75 poops. When she does, her anus expands dramatically (maybe as big as a grapefruit?) and goes turgid. Then it slowly shrinks back to the normal size.
• Cow 10 moves forward 4 steps.
• Cow 15 moves forward 5 steps.
• Cow 73 takes 1 step forward. Then 1 more step.
• Cow 75 walks forward 2 steps but now is facing slightly away from me.
• Cow 73 takes a few steps.
• Loud reggaeton in the distance but the cows seem unperturbed. Music continues to play, muted.
• Cow 75 moves another 4 steps and is now out of my line of vision.
• Cow 73 takes a small dump, then walks a few steps forward.
• Cow 77 and cow 75 are eating long grasses. 77 is a black cow with a white spot on her forehead.
• Cow 65, a new cow that moved in from the right, drinks from the water trough and has a small poop while it’s walking toward me. We make eye contact for 50 seconds. 65 breaks eye contact. Then she makes another 20 seconds of eye contact. Then she takes two steps closer to me and continues to direct her attention fully towards me while trough water drips from her mouth. She now is extremely close to the barbed wire I am standing behind, ~2.5 arms lengths away. I take two small steps closer to 65, and she continues to stare back without moving. Finally, she looks down and bends her neck through the barbed wire to eat some small ferns and bush leaves—quite different from what’s in the pasture—on the other side of the enclosure.
• Cow 10 is huffing. The sound is airy and sharp.
• Cow 65 starts walking away and licks her left back. Her tongue is so rough I can hear it scratching her skin.
• Cow 75 takes several steps towards the water trough and drinks water. She puts her front hooves on the trough edge, stands up on it, and looks around. A few moments later, she steps down and walks alongside the fence away from me.
• Cow 17 licks another brown and white cow (can’t see tag) on the back. I’m told this is for salt. 17 nuzzles this cow, and she turns around. They head butt, and the receiving cow steps back. 17 continues to lick her side.