Farmers in the Yamagata prefecture in Japan have started painting their cattle with zebra-like stripes to keep blood-sucking insects and flies away.
A low-cost solution is helping farmers improve comfort of their cattle and reducing the need to use insecticides on the farm lands.
The stress caused by these insects is so high that farmers have reported drops in reproduction rates in these herds.Farmers have, therefore, stopped releasing the cattle in farmlands to prevent the herd from being attacked by these blood-sucking flies. These efforts have been ongoing for over three years. More farmers are adopting them after seeing visible improvements in cattle conditions.
While the unpainted cattle were found to display these behaviors up to 16 times a minute, in their painted counterparts, the numbers dropped to just five. The trick is now being shared with other farmers, who have started adopting this low-cost approach to improve the comfort levels of their herds. The practice might seem like a tradition that people follow without any scientific evidence to support their claims.
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