I never realized how the rut or breeding season for whitetail deer could affect our cows here on the farm until one morning after the time changed earlier this month. We began milking at the “old time” that first morning after the clocks were turned an hour back, so I saw no reason to see how that would affect the cows as I pushed them from the holding pen to the milking parlor. That is, until Wanda, one of our top producers, came whipping by me like she was on some kind of energy drink. Wanda, as I know her, does not hold a speed record for anything. In fact, Wanda operates on Wanda speed and no one else’s. I knew something was not right when I saw Wanda go faster than Wanda speed. Perhaps, I thought to myself, Wanda just appeared to be going by quicker than usual because I was not up to speed yet.
It turns out Wanda was not the only one who broke a speed record. I soon noticed that other cows who were set at slow speeds under their versions of cruise control were showing signs of being quicker and more active than usual. It did not take much to coax them into the milking parlor. I began to wonder if I should have had more coffee before I came down to the barn to keep up with them. In fact, all of the cows were acting like they were on some kind of energy supplement. While it made it a lot easier for me to get them from Point A, the holding pen, to Point B, the milking parlor, I wondered what was making them act that way. Did Shaggy add some kind of nutritional supplement to their feed or what?
Later I mentioned it to Big C who was passing through the barn on the walk beside the holding pen. I told him how Wanda was acting and wondered if he noticed this strange behavior within the herd. He thought it not strange at all, given the time of year. He told me that the cows were reacting to the rut taking place in the woods not far away from the cow barn. All I could say was, “What?! What does the rut have to do with Wanda and the other cows?”
It was then that I learned that cows can smell doe urine from quite a distance and can tell when there are does in heat (the time when they feel they need to be bred). Big C informed me that when a doe is in heat, her urine smells similar to a cow’s urine when a cow is in heat. Since the doe urine throws off the smell of estrus, cows, once they smell it, realize it is the smell of being in heat and then react like they are in heat. When a cow goes into heat, she is definitely not herself. A calm cow becomes an excited cow. She jumps on other cows like they are bulls and has a glassy-eyed expression on her face. Slow cows become fast cows in the holding pen when they are in heat. And, if I do not pay attention to what goes on in the holding pen and one of those cows slips through to the milking parlor, she can take out a light tube from the ceiling by attempting to jump cows while they are getting milked.
Cows are not the only bovines affected by the smell coming from the rut of deer. Big C told me that the bulls become a bit agitated and can get downright ornery, if they happen to get a whiff of the strong smell a buck gives off during rut. Big C said to the human nose when a buck is in rut, the buck gives off a strong smell, a sour stink, as Big C puts it.
I did some research on the Internet and based on the A to Z Guide To White-tailed Deer And Deer Hunting by Dr Randall Gilbert, page 120: ”Sexual scents composed of female pheromones collected from the urinary tract of a doe in sexual heat (estrus) are sold commercially. These lures are used to attract bucks to a hunter’s area during the rut. The buck is focusing upon finding the source of those pheromones quickly. Some scent manufacturers substitute or mix bovine (cow) or sheep pheromones in their lures, claiming them to be chemically the same.” Based on this, Big C knew what he was talking about. Furthermore, Big C was right about how cows can detect what is going on with the whitetail deer from a distance because on page 145 of the A to Z Guide I found this nugget of information: ”The doe’s sexual pheromones carried on the air currents communicate her readiness to breed.”
Now, you wonder, how is it that cows can detect those pheromones carried in the air? If you do a search on Google typing in the words “dairy cattle sense of smell,” you will find a number of sources that indicate that cows have very good noses. The average result I got from such a search is that cows can smell odors from 5 to 6 miles away. They have a special technique, so to speak, particularly of being able to detect airborne pheromones. This technique is what is termed as the Flehman expression. According to this website, http://www.2farm.co.nz/animal_reproduction.htm a cow will stand still and look like she is studying something. She holds her head up and her mouth a little bit open so she can get a whiff of smell in the air, sometimes with her lips curled back. Per other research on the Internet, I learned that deer also use the same facial expression as a cow does to detect smells in the air, particularly sexual smells. So the next time you happen to see a cow doing funny things with her nose and lips, it’s not because she needs something to do to entertain herself because she is bored. It’s a way of finding out what’s going on in the neighborhood. Cows like even my canines have this thing for smell as a means of giving them information. This I see often when cows enter a stall in the milking parlor. They often stop a moment to sniff out who was in that stall before them, which annoys the guys doing the milking. The guys think the cows are dawdling around while in reality the cows are checking things out. Kind of like smell before you take a step, the bovine version of the human saying, “Look before you leap.”
Knowing this, now I will know that while goofy things are happening in the woods in the fall, things can get just as goofy all the way from the cow barn to the holding pen. The question then comes to my mind is this–can whitetail deer get goofy when they are not in rut just from smelling certain smells from the cow barn? Indeed, that is something to think about.
