Yeah science is pretty cool. I used to do some stuff in a behaviourist lab... They were working on the psychphysical abilities of possums and stuff (what colours, sounds etc they could detect). I think they were working on developing traps that emitted this high frequency of sound that actually attracted possums (and not native wildlife) to the traps. Also stuff on... Teaching cows to milk themselves... Sounds crazy but it was something like yellow triangle means it is time to be milked (and they just made their way to the milking machine) and red square meant it was not time to be milked. 'Further research will determine whether the cows are responding to the colour or the shape' lol. heh heh.

Yeah science is pretty interesting (who would have thought?). Did some stuff on behavioural economics too... You can run experiments to determine whether chickens will work as hard for litter as for other things that are considered 'needs' or whether they don't work so hard so litter is more a 'luxury'. They found that they work almost as hard for litter as they do for food (when they are kept at 80% body weight so they are very hungry indeed). Hence scratching in litter... Is very important to chickens indeed. That has implications for humane treatment of chickens regarding battery farming and even free range where free range means 500 of them kept in a room the size of my bathroom where they peck each other to death in some instances and have no access to litter... (Free range doesn't mean humane people... Though SPCA approved free range probably almost does though at around 3X the price...)

But yeah, science is interesting.

That is cool about the cow without lactose :-)
Watch out soya beans :-)

My old university was trying to breed goat/sheep.
The notion is you could milk em you could eat em you could take the wool from them...
Didn't work out so well apparantly.
They were also trying to breed water buffalo/cows.
The notion is that some parts of the world can't have cows 'cause it is too swampy and cows tend to get stuck in the swamp, fall over, and they can't get back up again. Water buffalo can manouver around swamps better 'cause their hooves are more suited but they don't have a very high milk yield. Oh the wonders of science ;-)

It is funny how lots of people with PhD's end up doing something fairly unrelated... Still... Gets you into something I guess :-)