Good for their physical health, but not great for their personal goals and expectations.
Oh, I was thinking more along the lines of any aspirations to not be a cow.
Did they study the paint chemicals themselves to see if that by itself was a natural bug repellant?
Did they check if the paint chemicals are even safe for cows?
🤔
What if it’s just the white stripes (not the band)? Do white cows have the same number of flies? What if you paint them with black stripes?
Maybe those are answered in the article, but I’ll never read it.
I haven’t read the study, but most of these would need a placebo group, so divide the herd into thirds, one with no paint, one with stripes, and one fully painted white to get a baseline for each group. Also would be good to randomize which group each cow goes in each day so to rule out one cow who is especially tasty to flies.
Those groups also have another characteristic that changes: the amount of the cow covered in paint.
How do you determine if its that vs the stripes or colors?
You paint a second control group the colors and patterns they already are
I’ve not seen the study referenced, but if I were doing it I’d have cows I painted with white paint, white stripes, black paint, and a control I left unpainted.
Yes, obviously. But are the flies possibly repelled by the paint? Are the flies even able to bite through the paint?
Edit: 50% stripes, 50% reduction in bug bites.
Coincidence? I think not.
A control group where they mix the colors together and paint them grey would answer that
Yes. They had a control group with only black stripes along with an unpainted group. I would have to assume they also checked the paints for potential repellents, but I only skimmed the article.
That’s where Hershey’s Cookies and Cream chocolate bars are from!
Sure, that it wasn’t the smell of the paint, that drove the insects away?
If you look at the study you can see that they also had a treatment of black stripes on black cows to control for just that:
The cows were assigned to treatments using a 3 × 3 Latin-square design. The treatments consisted of black-and-white painted stripes (B&W), black painted stripes (B), and no stripes (CONT) as a control (Fig 1).
Thanks for the response. 🙂 I indeed hadn’t look into the paper as there was no link in the original post, but I have done so now and it seem, you are right. Thanks! 👍
See, some people think forcible sterilization is never acceptable, and yet we have multiple comments from people that didn’t read the study asking if the authors thought of something.
Maybe you’d know if you were literate.
You can have your balls back if you do your homework.
Being illiterate has no correlation with wanting other people to do all the work for me. We’re just lazy. Please do some homework before jumping to conclusions.
Alright, so for the idiots here, how is this not a study showing that paint repels mosquitos?
The treatments were black-and-white painted stripes, black painted stripes, and no stripes (all-black body surface). Recorded fly-repelling behaviors were head throw, ear beat, leg stamp, skin twitch, and tail flick. Photo images of the right side of each cow were taken using a commercial digital camera after every observation and biting flies on the body and each leg were counted from the photo images. Here we show that the numbers of biting flies on Japanese Black cows painted with black-and-white stripes were significantly lower than those on non-painted cows and cows painted only with black stripes
Black paint was not as effective as black and white paint.
It did show in the results that black paint had a 15%/10% decrease or something around there though. Would that indicate anything? Another group done with white stripes and a fully painted white and black group I think would have helped but maybe there was good reason not to.
