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If you spent a fortune on insect repellent last summer a team of Japanese scientists might just have a better solution for you – stripy make-up.

Biting insects are a major problem for cows and the beasts tend to spend long period in fields and devote a lot of energy to keeping flies away by tossing their heads, stamping their feet and twitching their tails.

The stress of all this bug-repelling behaviour reduces milk yields and so farmers often resort to using insecticides to keep the annoying critters away.

But that itself causes a problem because, apart from the danger of the toxic substance getting into the food chain, there’s also the fact that insects can generally develop an immunity to any insecticide after 10 years or so.

(Image: Kojima et al)

So the scientists took a different tack.

They took a group of six Japanese black cows and painted two with white stripes, two with back stripes, and left two alone.

The black-on-black cows were painted that way so the scientists could determine whether it was the colour or the paint itself that was deterring the bugs.

So that everybody got a turn, each pair of cows spent two days with white stripes, two days with black stripes, and two just as nature intended.

(Image: Kojima et al)

At the end of the experiment it was revealed that the black-and-white bovines enjoyed an almost 50% reduction in biting bugs.

The scientists’ report concluded: “These results thus suggest that painting black-and-white stripes on livestock such as cattle can prevent biting fly attacks and provide an alternative method of defending livestock against biting flies without using pesticides in animal production, thereby proposing a solution for the problem of pesticide resistance in the environment.”



(Image: Kojima et al)

So, next time you’re driving past a field and you see some striped cows, it’s not just a farmer trying to convince his rivals that they own some exotic zebras.

It’s a a brilliant eco-friendly solution to insect infestations.

Why not try it yourself next summer?