He started out by explaining to how a cow’s vision worked.

“Sight is the dominant sense in all cattle and prey type animals,” he said.

He asked them if they thought cows could see in color or only black and white. He then informed them that cows have excellent color vision and see oranges, yellows, and reds. He said they also have the ability to see things move over the horizon.

“Eyesight is a very important thing in cattle and [they] use it effectively,” he said.

He said the hearing was another important sense that they could use pretty effectively. He said jokingly that if a tree fell in the woods and a person wanted to know where it fell, they could just look in the direction their cow was staring.

He said smell was an important sense because they used it to detect pheromones and this was very important for communication in the animals. He also told the audience that cows could detect and distinguish between sweet and bitter tastes. The ability to detect bitterness keeps them from eating toxic plants.

“Cows are very sensitive to taste and smell,” he said.

He said this was very important for a farmer to know when making decisions of feed.

Shearer said, as far as the sense of touch, the cow has very good pain receptors all over the body. However, their reaction to pain can be subtle and it was sometime hard to tell if they were in pain or ill. He told them that when cows are ill they will sit off by themselves, put their head down, and “become depressed.” He said it was very important for a farmer to notice these changes in his cattle, so that he could determine if they are ill or in pain.

Shearer said the subtleness was an instinctive thing going back to cattle being “prey animals.” In the wild, animals that show weakness are the ones that get eaten first.

“They have all the instincts of prey animals,” he said.

In closing, he said cows were very easy animals to work with and very docile as a rule.

“What makes them dangerous at times is we forget how they perceive us,” he said.