Exploring social agency: Cows react to human emotions displayed in videos and use this information to guide subsequent interaction choices

Positive animal welfare emphasizes that animals should experience positive mental states through opportunities for choice and goal-directed behaviour. This requires a degree of agency - the ability to actively engage with the environment, gather information, and use it later.This study explores the expression of agency within the human-animal relationship by testing whether cows can perceive human emotions and use that information to guide subsequent interactions. Thirty-nine cows were shown two 30-second videos: one of an experimenter expressing joy and another expressing anger through facial and vocal cues. Afterward, both experimenters simultaneously presented themselves to the cows in a choice test. During video exposure, cows looked longer at the anger video and showed a left-eye bias, suggesting right-hemisphere processing of negatively valenced stimuli. They also displayed more behaviours indicative of a negative perception. In the subsequent choice test, cows spent significantly more time close to the experimenter who had previously expressed joy. These results demonstrate that cows can discriminate and remember human emotional expressions and use this information to guide future social interactions. These abilities highlight a component of agency in cows and help identify contexts where it may be expressed, with implications for improving human–animal relationships and welfare.