INTRODUCTION
A Google Search for the term “stress” will bring up a variety of articles. If these publications are true, a lot of people are feeling stressed, including: couples planning weddings, couples getting divorced, school teachers, retirees, poor people, wealthy people, employed and unemployed people, and many others! When it comes to people, stress is a hot topic and everyone is looking for ways to manage stress they experience. Even though articles on stress are commonplace, most, surprisingly, do not define stress. Scientists who study stress tell us it is “an organism’s response to a perceived threat” and they refer to the threat as a stressor. For example, if you hit your thumb with a hammer, the pain you feel is the stressor. The complex response to that pain (including elevated heart rate, swelling, and later, increased susceptibility to infections) is the stress. So if we want to manage the stress in our lives we need to consider both the stressor (the threat) and the stress (the body’s response to the stressor). The stress response is similar for humans and animals, including dairy cattle. Stressors can be physical (for example: a back injury in a farmer; high temperature-humidity index in dairy cows) or psychological (learning of a new, lower milk price by a farmer; moving to a new pen for a dairy cow).
Continue reading →