New research led by scientists from the French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment (INRAE) suggests cows (Bos taurus taurus) can distinguish between known and unknown people, and even match a familiar voice to the correct face.
Amichaud et al. found that cows not only recognize human faces, but can connect them with familiar voices. Image credit: NeiFo.
“Cows are social animals and were domesticated 10,500 years ago,” said INRAE researcher Océane Amichaud and colleagues.
“They possess good visual acuity and a large visual field (330 degrees).”
“Socio-cognitive abilities towards humans have been poorly studied in cows.”
“However, dairy cows, in particular, live in close contact with humans from birth, being bottle-fed by humans or milked daily, for example.”
“There is a growing body of evidence suggesting that domestic animals can discriminate and/or recognize human faces, but these abilities have not yet been demonstrated in cows.”
“Given the number of species in which human recognition has been demonstrated, it would be surprising if this were not the case with cattle, thus warranting further investigation.”
To better understand whether cows could discriminate between familiar and unfamiliar faces, the authors collected data from 32 Prim’ Holstein cows.
They played the cows muted videos of familiar and unfamiliar male faces, and measured how long the animals gazed at them.
They looked for cross-modal recognition, playing videos of familiar and unfamiliar faces while broadcasting audio corresponding to one of the two men, with each man saying an identical sentence.
They also measured the animals’ heart rates as they watched the videos to see if the cows responded emotionally.
The bovines were uncowed by silent videos, and stared longer at videos of unfamiliar people, showing that they could distinguish between a known and unknown face.
When the videos were paired with sound, the animals spent more time staring at the video when the voice matched the face, showing the cows could pair a face with the voice they herd.
But based on their heart rates, none of the familiar or unfamiliar faces or voices seemed to affect the cows’ emotional response.
“Our results show that cows are able to discriminate between familiar and unfamiliar individuals and form cross-modal representations of these people,” the authors said.
“Based on these results, future research should explore whether cows can adjust their behaviour depending on the person they are interacting with — a capacity that may reflect their agency in human-animal relationships.”
The findings were published online this month in the journal PLoS ONE.
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O. Amichaud et al. 2026. Cows visually discriminate and cross-modally recognise familiar and unfamiliar human faces in videos. PLoS One 21 (5): e0329529; doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0329529
