When cattle have to go, try the MooLoo

With 1.4 billion cattle on Earth, excess waste is a fact of life, and it’s bad for the planet. As animals burp, urinate and defecate, they let loose greenhouse gases that are a factor behind climate change, according to scientists.

Now there’s a way to capture cattle urine — and potentially reduce the 55 to 110 gallons of daily methane, not to mention nitrogenous components in the urine that pollute streams and rivers.

Calves can be be potty trained. That’s right, just like a toddler who must learn to go potty, calves can be trained to urinate in one spot. That, says scientists, will allow their urine to be collected, treated and neutralized. Using what researchers are calling the “MooLoo” makes urine less dangerous.

The training works like this: Animals are taught to urinate in a special pen inside their barns. Any that go outside the designated area get a short burst of water to retrain them, while those that use the right spot receive a sweet treat.

Researchers say 11 out of 16 calves learned to use the MooLoo in just 15 training sessions, comparing favorably to the amount of time 3- and 4-year-old children are toilet trained. The animals are smarter than they look, it seems.

To be honest, toilet training cattle is not going to do much to help the planet. Intensive livestock production, whether for meat or dairy, is spread too widely across the world. One scientist, Andrew Knight of England’s University of Winchester, told the Washington Post that the nitrous oxide in cattle urine is incredibly potent, with 296 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide.

Livestock, he said, produce “more greenhouse gases than all the cars, trucks, planes in the world combined.” What’s more, the cost of neutralizing the damaging components in animal waste is too expensive for many of the world’s farmers, he pointed out.

However, being able to treat urine could help areas severely impacted by the livestock industry.

The country of the Netherlands, for example, is weighing forcing farmers to decrease herds by as much as 30 percent to reduce ammonia pollution. If those farmers could treat urine and eliminate its damaging elements, they could keep larger herds.

The reductions are necessary, say officials, to improve what is being called the Netherlands’ “nitrogen crisis,” a byproduct of manure and ammonia. That nitrogen running off farmlands into lakes and streams damages habitats and creates algae blooms. Even collecting 10 to 20 percent of global cattle urination could reduce greenhouse gas emissions and nitration leaching significantly, researchers say.

And that significant reduction is why scientists spend time researching where and how cattle urinate, inventing the MooLoo and, in the process, showing bovines aren’t as dumb as humans believed.