Cowpuppy: An Unexpected Friendship and a Scientist's Journey Into the Secret World of Cows

The bestselling author of How Dogs Love Us stumbles onto a special friendship with a cow named BB and sets out to crack the code of communicating with this most common but much misunderstood animal.

Cowpuppy is the story of how Emory University neuroscientist Gregory Berns turned his scientific eye from studying the inner workings of dogs' brains to the cognitive and emotional lives of cows. It is also the story of how one cow formed an unusual bond with Berns that rivaled that of his beloved dogs.

Berns had spent decades using brain imaging technology to study how the human brain works. Ten years ago, he launched a project that nobody thought possible: to train dogs to lie still in an MRI scanner so that he could determine how dogs see the world and, most importantly, whether they love us. These groundbreaking studies paved the way for a new era of canine cognition and resulted in the NYT and WSJ bestseller, How Dogs Love Us, as well as the follow-up What It's Like to Be a Dog, which the Smithsonian named as one of the ten best science books of 2017.

Now, Berns has applied these same scientific skills of observation and innovation to a most unlikely animal: The humble cow. After buying a farm in rural Georgia, Berns and his wife could never have imagined what would transpire when they bought some cows to help start their new farm life.

Berns's observations will challenge readers to think about cows in a new light. He shows that cows have impressive memories, a skill he attributes to a large hippocampus in their brains. Cows remember who has done what to them - both good and bad - and these memories form the basis of their relationships with each other and to humans. Far from being dumb animals raised for food, Berns shows them capable of forming bonds with people that are stronger than the ones dogs forge (because cows are selective while dogs are friends with everyone). Moreover, Berns shows that cows are even more highly attuned to the emotional state of humans than dogs are.

Cowpuppy interweaves accessible scientific explanations of animal behavior into a personal, moving, and sometimes hilarious memoir as Berns and his wife buy a farm and must learn how to run it. Along the way, the reader meets a cast of characters that portray the complex history and culture of rural Georgia, including a very special "cowpuppy" named BB.