Cow brushes – improving animal welfare one scratch at a time

The SPCA Certified animal welfare certification programme aims to improve the quality of life of farmed animals by setting standards above the legal minimum.

Cattle are sentient, meaning they can experience negative (e.g. boredom, frustration) and positive emotions (e.g. pleasure, comfort) which contribute to their overall quality of life. This is why environmental enrichment is an important requirement in all SPCA Certified standards – it promotes positive experiences by providing stimuli that encourage natural behaviours necessary for mental and physical well-being.

Environmental enrichment can include social, cognitive, physical, sensory, and nutritional stimulation, and where possible should focus on species-specific behaviours. For cattle this would include grazing, grooming, and interactions with other cattle. Making an animal’s environment more interesting can also promote learning and development and help make animals more resilient to stress later in life.

You often see cattle scratching hard-to-reach places using trees and fence posts. This helps to remove dirt and parasites, increases blood flow to the skin which helps to cool cattle down (important for those hot summer days!), and may even increase milk production and decrease mastitis incidence. Aside from these obvious physical benefits, scratching also appears to be something that cattle really enjoy (possibly through an increase in feel-good hormones and a reduction in stress) and which is important to them.

Cows love brushes!

Motivation tests show us how important a resource may be to an animal by asking the animal to work (e.g. pushing a weighted gate) to access that resource. Animals will work harder to access a resource that is important to them. Research shows having access to a brush is important to cattle – the cows in the study worked as hard to access a brush as they did to access fresh food! Meaning they really liked being brushed or having the opportunity to brush themselves.

Cattle may not be able to fulfil their scratching motivation if paddocks and barns don’t have the right type of scratching objects. This is why the SPCA Certified standards specifically require that cows must have access to enrichment objects on which to scratch, such as trees, cow brushes, or scratching frames.

Being able to scratch that itch whenever they want will help keep cows happy and contribute to an overall good quality of life.

If you have any questions about environmental enrichment for cattle, enquire at certified@spca.nz