A new study called Are Cows More Likely to Lie Down the Longer They Stand? adds to our knowledge of what cows do and why they do it.

Some researchers succumb to temptation – hazarding unprovable guesses as to cows' intentions, motivations and desires. Five scientists in Scotland, though, took a careful path, methodically measuring a very specific part of the what, and not guessing too wildly at the why.

Bert Tolkamp, Marie Haskell, Fritha Langford, David Roberts and Colin Morgan, based at the Scottish Agricultural College, published their monograph in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science.

It builds upon a large body of work by other researchers. Some of the earlier reports have almost poetical titles. The best in that respect is (in my opinion, at least) a Swedish report called Effects of Milking Frequency on Lying Down and Getting Up Behaviour of Dairy Cows. Its authors, Sara Osterman and Ingrid Redbo of the Kungsängen Research Centre in Uppsala, argue that milking thrice a day – rather than twice – "contributes to increased comfort in high-producing dairy cows".

The Scottish team focused on questions that stem indirectly from that Swedish study.

Tolkamp, Haskell, Langford, Roberts and Morgan set out to test two hypotheses – two educated guesses – about the nature of cowhood.

First, they hypothesized that the longer a cow has been lying down, the more likely it soon will stand up. After gathering lots of what-did-the-cows-do data, they report that yes, this is exactly what happens. Generally speaking, you can't keep a good cow down, not for long, not if the cow is healthy.

Their second hypothesis looked at things the other way round. They predicted the longer a cow has been standing up, the more likely it is to lie down. Here the cows gave them a surprise.

After ruminating over their results, the team decided that no, their expectation was wrong. The truth, they conclude, is that once a cow has stood up, you can't easily predict how soon it will lie down again.

This kind of experiment, if it is to produce trustworthy results, requires a series of careful technical decisions. How many cows should you watch, under what circumstances, and for how long? How can you reliably monitor whether and when each cow has officially stood up or flopped down?

The scientists examined three groups of cows. They attached an electronic sensor to each animal, to automatically note and record the cow's ups and downs. They then validated some of the findings, by watching video recordings of some cows and comparing what they saw with what the sensors had said.

Some mysteries persist. "The question of why some cows had total daily resting times less than half of those achieved by other cows in the same experiment, as well as many other questions", says the report, "remain to be addressed in future research."

(Thanks to Richard Wassersug for bringing this to my attention.)

Marc Abrahams

• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize