# Linguistic and Material Ways of Communicating with Cows—The Dung Pusher as a Semiotic Resource

## TL;DR

This paper explores how farm workers use sticks like dung pushers to communicate with cows, showing these objects carry meaning for both humans and animals.

## Contribution

The study introduces the concept of material objects as semiotic resources in human-animal communication.

## Key findings

- Dung pushers and snow stakes function as 'meaning-carriers' in human-cow interactions.
- These sticks take on multiple roles such as tools, pointers, and weapons depending on context.
- The study emphasizes the shared meaningful space between cows and humans on dairy farms.

## Abstract

This study explores how Finnish dairy farm workers communicate with cattle using different modalities of communication: spoken language, touch, gestures, and material objects. The study is based on fieldwork, interviews, and video recordings from dairy farms. The study shows how two types of sticks, dung pushers and snow stakes, are used in a cattle barn when communicating with cows. The way these sticks are used turns them into “meaning-carriers”, which means that they become more than just tools for cleaning floors or marking roadsides. The way dung pushers and snow stakes become “meaning-carriers” depends on the farm’s setup and the cows’ living conditions. The article discusses the biosemiotic concept of “Umwelt,” a unique world of experiences and meanings for each species, and emphasizes the importance of trying to understand animals’ perspectives. This research highlights that cows and humans share a living space full of meaning, and that the space and its material objects constitute a world of multi-dimensional meanings for both humans and cows.

This study examines how farm workers working with cattle talk to and interact with these non-human animals. This study presents linguistic animal studies and multi-species pragmatics, and it is based on fieldwork, interviews, and video recordings from several types of Finnish dairy farms. This study concentrates especially on one facet of human–cattle interaction: how humans use dung pushers and other sticks when communicating with cows. Thus, it draws on the materiality of language. It is shown how objects, bodies, and spaces, as well as words and linguistic constructions, are meaningful in human–animal interaction. Videoed recordings are analysed with multimodal conversation analysis. It is shown how dung pushers and snow stakes are used when steering cows, making them stand up, and pointing at things. It is then shown how these objects become ‘meaning-carriers’ for humans and for cows. For example, the dung pusher acquires four different meaning qualities for the human participants in the cattle barns: floor-cleaner quality, shepherd’s-crook quality, pointer quality, and weapon quality. The study examines how the cows’ and humans’ Umwelts, the subjective meaning universes of these species and their constituent individuals, influence interaction on farms and how and why the dung pusher becomes a semiotic resource.