What is your favorite music genre? What is your your favorite singer? These questions commonly would ask for human. But, do you know that some of the animals do enjoy music? They do have preference of particular genre, style, even favorite singer. For us, music is part of our daily life style. Since the beginning of day when we woke up, we heard the radio’s accompany us while we savor our coffee and breakfast. And yes, human do have appreciation of music.
But, something we missed is, some animals also have musical appreciation within them. Every single of them would have shown different reaction on the tunes, rhythm, and beat – the example is bird. Some of us probably already know that bird is a vocal animal when it comes to music – moreover, perhaps bird is the only animal that have the same frequency of music like us. Let’s take bird parrot and cockatiel as the example. These two birds known as the bird who could copying human voices and whistle the melodies.
A study from Emory University revealed that bird’s brain have the same mechanism to make a music just like human’s brain. Not only bird, elephant – the famous artistic mammal – have proved themselves could play the music. Richard Liar, conservationist is the creator of Thai Elephant Orchestra once again have proved that this amazing animal understand instrument as harmonies and keep the rhythm of the music.
And dog, we do understand that dog have a good taste of music preference. In fact, music is good for your dog. How is that so? One main reason is dog used music as the tool of relaxation just like human – and no kidding, they prefer the classical instrument as the relaxation out of other genre (even some of us didn’t quite understand). What a royalty animal! Furthermore, there’s one animal you couldn’t miss that do enjoy companion of music – the animal is cow! Cow love music, how cute is that?
So, do cow understand music? The answer is yes – or even more! There’s an old Chinese proverb said – playing music to cow – and the truth of this proverb was incredible! And we will discover the fact with you, my friends in this article: cow love music, how cute is that?
Music Effect The Milking Process
The milking process that cow did require the biological balance. The stressed cow could never produce a good milk or even more, the mental pressure would make cow hamper the most important hormone named oxytocin (the main key of milk-releasing process). It is part of the farmer job to keep the balance of the herd before this process, one of the livestock industry in California called The California Dairy Industry said that happy cheese comes from happy cows. That is correct.
Moreover, this situation even occur in human. Ordinarily, the new mother of child would be advice to keep the balance and avoided the stress. This could inhibit the milk process to release. Apparently, this condition also occur cow. So, what you need to do to make the cow to be relax? That is simple, you could play music from your android, radio, or other device. It might sound ridiculous or stupid, by some farmer (for a long period of time) claimed that they would play some relaxing music such instrumental melodies for the excellent quality of milk.
There’s a study from University of Leicester of England in 2001; a pair of psychologists revealed that slow tempo music increased the cow’s production of milk about three percent. But, the fast tempo music which didn’t give any effect for the herd. But, there’s no strong research about the connection between the milk product relation with the music, because generally, the researcher apparently was interested only for the welfare of the cow than the production parameters.
This researcher found that music bring beneficial for the cow’s well-being, but this habit must be a regular routine – calming and consistent. The Aurora Organic Farms (Colorado’s one of the biggest dairy corporation centered) executive vice president, Juan Velez claimed that the greatest stress factor from the sensory perspective of the dairy cow’s well-being is distracting and loud noise. Juan added that the volume and the style must be consistent, and music would have given the positive effect on the milk.
Now, here are the list of music you could use to make as a tool of relaxation which you can play for your cow:
- Classical Music: Haydn, Beethoven concerto for flute and harp in D major, pastoral symphony, Beethoven symphony No. 7, and Mozart symphony No. 5.
- The Mixture of Contemporary and Classic: Celtic Woman, Perfect Day by Danny Williams, Everybody Hurt, Bridge Over Troubled Water by Aretha Franklin, What a Difference A Day Makes by REM, Oronoco Flow by Lou Reed, Moon River by Simon and Garfunkel.
Once more testimony from Minnesota’s dairy farmer named Spadgenske, he said that musics are the calming sounds for cows, if the cow in a peace and calm condition, then obviously they would produce the better milk. However, there are some ways to keep cow in peace and calm state, but music is certainly one of those ways.
In U.S majority of the dairies would play Spanish or country music in the parlors (this choice was taken depend on the preference of employee). And the fact is, the beat of the song more likely the biggest matter than the genre of the music itself. Revealed (in study) that most of the animals would prefer slow rhythm music and find it more relaxing than the fast beat music. But, this fact also different and much depends to the cow’s preference itself, Frannie Miller from Texas often plays Spanish music in her parlor.
She claimed that her cows apparently tolerate the western and country genre of music, but don’t like Willie Nelson. This fact was proved that dairy cow or basically the majority of cow do understand music – they even have their own preference. So yes, it depend on the cow. Some cow might tolerate some medium beat of song and some might not and prefer the slow rhythm music. One thing for sure, cow didn’t like the fast one. Don’t ever try to play Metallica’s songs, boys!