"Something about that look, those ears, that tail. But, mostly the look"

February 15, 2019 3:21 PM

BBC: Tudder features data profiles of animals from 42,000 UK farms in an effort to help farmers find the perfect breeding partner for their cattle. Farmers can view pictures of bulls or cows and swipe right to show interest. ABC: "I'd have to talk to Brownie and a few of the girls and see what they're really wanting," Mr Jenkins said. Guardian: ‘How do they swipe right with their hooves?’ Metro: Launching just in time for the most romantic day of the year, the pioneering matchmaking app is thought to be the first of its kind for livestock. (App)
posted by Wordshore (19 comments total)

This isn't something out of Beef and Dairy Network?

Rich. Beef. Sausages.
posted by Artnchicken at 3:36 PM on February 15, 2019 [4 favorites]

See also: Australia’s “Good Bulls” app.
posted by wintermind at 3:38 PM on February 15, 2019

Serious question: Isn't breeding partner suitability determined by pedigrees, or is there more to a selection than just that? (Or is this just a silly stunt app release and I missed the punch line?)
posted by Greg_Ace at 3:49 PM on February 15, 2019 [1 favorite]

Alternate punch line: Create an app that allows farmers to upload a 6-second video of their animals, and call it Bo-Vine.
posted by Greg_Ace at 3:49 PM on February 15, 2019 [10 favorites]

Serious question: Isn't breeding partner suitability determined by pedigrees, or is there more to a selection than just that? (Or is this just a silly stunt app release and I missed the punch line?)

This documentary shows a German specialist in animal husbandry going through the analysis involved in selecting mates for cattle. In the course of several video segments interspersed throughout the entire documentary about agricultural technology, unfortunately. (Content warning: bull semen collection and lots of cow shit. Also, creepy eugenicist-like glorification of trait selection and animal breeding in German with subtitles.)
posted by XMLicious at 4:37 PM on February 15, 2019 [2 favorites]

How do they swipe right with their hooves?

Whatever you do, don't tell them it's a Grindr for cattle.

(That tends to upset them. Or so I've herd.)
posted by ZenMasterThis at 4:46 PM on February 15, 2019 [4 favorites]

Hell, I'd date this cow: Meet Blonnie: A best friend, always and forever. "She’s the perfectly imperfect cow who gave a shy girl with a rare brain disease a powerful reason to live."
posted by clawsoon at 4:58 PM on February 15, 2019 [4 favorites]

Also, creepy eugenicist-like glorification of trait selection and animal breeding in German with subtitles.

I'm trying to parse out what the creepy part is here. Eugenics works great for breeding cows that make a lot of milk. For people, not so great. Is it the German that's creepy? Creepy subtitles? Are they talking about, uh, people eugenics?

My limited understanding of how cow breeding worked 20 years ago is that they collected a lot of semen from a few bulls, inseminated cows, looked to see which offspring gave the most milk and then use that bull's semen for hundreds more cows. Apparently a little bull semen goes a long way. But a few generations of that and you get a 4x increase in per-cow milk production in 60 years.

The chart is nutty. Eugenics!
posted by GuyZero at 5:29 PM on February 15, 2019 [1 favorite]

And clarifying, I guess eugenics is really just about people, it's just animal husbandry when it's animals. So I retract my last word as regular cow breeding is not, by definition, eugenics.
posted by GuyZero at 5:38 PM on February 15, 2019 [1 favorite]

One set of my grandparents were dairy farmers. I'd go and spend a couple weeks with them (and my other set of grandparents who lived "in town") every summer when I was a kid. I remember looking through the junk mail they'd get, and flipping through small catalogs of bulls that you could buy semen from. They had a little thumbnail picture, then their name, contact info and stats, and price per... dose? I was too young to know about personal ads, but they were essentially the same thing. Tudder, following the same arc, makes perfect sense.

(As far as I know, Grandma and Grandpa did not share these ads with the cows. If I was just a little bit older, I may have tried to bring a page out to the barn and see which one a cow sniffed at first, and tried to convince them to make that match happen)
posted by Fig at 6:12 PM on February 15, 2019 [5 favorites]

GuyZero, we use much more complex selection objectives than milk yield these days: Net merit as a measure of lifetime profit: 2018 revision (self-link). We combine information about 38 different traits into 4 indices, which differ on the market for a farmer’s milk!
posted by wintermind at 6:26 PM on February 15, 2019 [3 favorites]

/narrows eyes

this has something to do with Johnny's evil plan somehow I can smell it
posted by mwhybark at 6:28 PM on February 15, 2019 [4 favorites]

How does one...collect...bull semen? Is this a specialty profession, or is it automated? Honestly I don’t know which would be worse.
posted by schadenfrau at 6:38 PM on February 15, 2019 [1 favorite]

I’m still really interested in heritage breeds after reading a textbook about them. It sounds like this is especially useful for farmers who raise heritage breeds. Populations of these animals are much lower than they used to be, thanks to the rise of industrial farming and the associated breeds. The vast majority of cattle are now just a few breeds, whereas 60-70 years ago there was a lot more diversity (most farmers now raising breeds that are not especially suited to their environments, to say nothing of the loss of unique traits in the animals themselves). Because of the lower populations, it can be much harder to maintain a herd of heritage cattle, because there simply aren’t as many viable animals.

I wonder how many users of this will be heritage farmers, vs farmers just selecting for yield and so on. I don’t know much about that aspect of things, and I know next to nothing about how t works in the UK.

The BBC article mentioned what sounds like a heritage breed, Welsh Black, but I don’t have time to look it up. Any insights on this?
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 6:43 PM on February 15, 2019 [1 favorite]

schadenfrau, bulls are trained to mount a “teaser” animal (a steer, which is a castrated male). When they do, their penis is diverted into an artificial vagina, and the ejaculate is captured in a sterile tube. Bulls don’t require much stimulus beyond temperature, so it’s quick and easy for both bull and human. The semen is sent to a lab that is usually on-site, where the sample is checked for quality before it’s diluted and packaged in 0.5 ml plastic straws. The straws are stored in a special tank in the vapor phase of liquid nitrogen until it’s thawed for use (insemination). Some semen is sorted into X- or Y-chromosome-bearing lots before packaging. This is done because, for example, dairy farmers want heifer (female) calves to use in their herd. Most bulls are collected 4 times a week, but this can vary by age and facility.
posted by wintermind at 6:58 PM on February 15, 2019 [8 favorites]

Grindr for bulls. A zillion years ago, my father paid for my fancy college by importing bull semen from Australia—he first thought about shipping the whole animal, and then learned that getting the jizz was faster and cheaper. The Murray Grey.
posted by Ideefixe at 7:46 PM on February 15, 2019 [1 favorite]

And clarifying, I guess eugenics is really just about people, it's just animal husbandry when it's animals. So I retract my last word as regular cow breeding is not, by definition, eugenics.

There can be some pretty awful aspects of animal husbandry though. I had a genetics professor who was part of a project to remove a genetic hip dysplasia disorder from Alaskan Malamute champions that involved breeding and killing three generations of purebreds until they were confident the bad genes were out of the pool (this was back when there was no genome sequencing so who knows what happens now 20 years later..... Oh shit 35 years later).

It gave me weird feelings because on one hand suffering is greatly reduced over time as disorder is gone from the future of the line but on the other hand it felt like a lot of dogs lives were "wasted" when they were culled for having parents with the gene.
posted by srboisvert at 2:36 AM on February 16, 2019

srboisvert, believe me when I say that I understand what you mean. Hip dysplasia is thought to be controlled by many genes. That means you can’t use a simple approach, such as not mating two carriers. Instead, you use a slower approach, in which you sample data from animals and families spread all across your population, and compute predictions of resistance/susceptibility to dysplasia. You then pick mates based on those breeding values. As a matter of fact, I have a current project with Cornell on proper modeling of hip and elbow dysplasia. That approach can be slow, but genetic gains accumulate over time, as in the figure GuyZero shared above (I’m pretty sure it originally came from our lab, which is cool). If you get all of the proper pieces in place, including widespread DNA genotyping, you can even go twice as fast as before (self-link).
posted by wintermind at 6:06 AM on February 16, 2019 [3 favorites]

breeding and killing three generations of purebreds until they were confident the bad genes were out of the pool (this was back when there was no genome sequencing so who knows what happens now 20 years later..... Oh shit 35 years later).

Today, the "cull" dogs would be sold as pets under spay/neuter contracts, also (at least, if they weren't in crippling pain). The culture of conformation-show-oriented pedigree dog breeders has changed dramatically from what it was like at that time; it used to be that puppies born with obvious faults were usually euthanized at birth, but now they are generally sold to non-show homes.
posted by sciatrix at 7:15 AM on February 16, 2019