Just when I thought Twitter could not possibly become any more ridiculous or meaningless, someone had to go and figure out a way.The people over at the Critical Media Lab in the University of Waterloo have gone somewhat loony and teamed up with a local Ontario dairy farmer to give 12 cows twitter accounts.
Mad Cow strikes again
The bovines (sounds like a cool band name), with names like Jerry J Lo, Freeride Speedy, and Attention Please, have been given the chance to broadcast the ins and outs of their lactation cycles in 140 characters or less.
So it may be more accurate and, ehem, a-moo-sing to say their teats have been given the tweets.
As often as four times a day, in excruciating detail, the cows report how much milk they’ve proudly pumped from their udders, as well as how quickly they managed to do it. From my very unscientific sample, the cows tend to pump around 11 kgs of milk in about three to four minutes.
These statistics are often followed by challenges or mock insults to their human followers. Here’s an example from “Charge Mabel,” a three year-old: “I just squirted 7.9 kgs of milk out of my teats in 3:39 seconds. What did you do today?” Fantastic stuff.
Cowabunga
For those wondering if anyone would ever want to know any of this, let it be noted that the number of followers for each cow ranges from 66 (Goldwyn Windy) to 302 (Attention Please). Turns out some people are indeed thirsty for dairy updates.
The madness seems to be a rather cheesy publicity stunt to raise awareness for the various uses of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags, which -in this particular case – are being used in tandem with a laser-guided milking system.
The way the system works is by tracking when a cow should be at its peak lactation time, and only then letting it into the milking pen. Once a cow enters the pen, “a robotic arm washes her teats, latches on and extracts the milk while the cow eats high-grade feed to make her happy.
“The milk output and feed input is recorded by the main computer and stored in a database, along with the total milking time, time/teat, and total time in pen,” explains the team behind the silliness.
Ah, technology. Finally giving cows the voice their teats so sorely needed.
