AI is replacing the jobs of bulls in India!
- Karishma Dotia
- 3 days ago
- 2 min read
Yes you read that right!
The bulls are losing their jobs to AI.
Before you visualize any further, I am not referring to the bulls of Wall Street or at the National Stock Exchange of India. I am referring to the bulls in rural India. They are losing their jobs to AI.
Now for a minute when I heard AI while on field immersions for a project across rural Madhya Pradesh last week, I was puzzled too. As we went for in-context interviews and observations of farmers’ work in animal husbandry and their behaviors towards maintaining good health, the acronym “AI” came up a couple of times.
The paravets kept saying - “ab toh AI aa gaya…” (now that AI is here…)
The farm owners kept saying “Ab tractor aur AI ke baad bel rakhne ki kya zaroorat?” (Now after we have a tractor and AI, what is the point of rearing a bull?)
Through some more in-context conversations, we finally gathered that AI here stands for Artificial Insemination.
As a farming family grows its business, they aspire to own a tractor for efficiency but also as a symbol of growing status in the community. Once the farm owners have a tractor and the heavily promoted doorstep “AI” services from the government, owning and spending on raising a bull is considered redundant. So mama cows and buffalos are reared to produce baby cows and buffalos for milk. The reproduction happens through Artificial Insemination (AI) because the country's goal is achieving milk production at speed and scale.
One of the veterinary doctors I met, during our side conversations shared how a well preserved sample of bull’s semen can remain potent for up to 200 - 300 years, long after the donor bull is gone. To my surprise this is plausible, there are studies that show that sperm viability and motility are not impacted even 45 years later for a well preserved sample and has the potential to remain functional indefinitely.1
No bulls - on the farms helping with ploughing or grazing in the natural environment.
No bulls, because we can cryopreserve their gametes.
No bulls needed.
In theory the same could be possible for human males too through cryopreservation. Though the current gender dynamics across the globe make it very less probable.
In rural farms, AI came after the bulls, they didn’t have a say. In the Urban jungles of the Homo sapiens, well what can we say? If not the AI ruling rural India, another AI is definitely coming!
Besides field data, as researcher we often gather side notes, not always relevant to the study, but equally interesting to build our domain knowledge. Follow me on LinkedIn to stay updated on new "side notes" from my fieldwork adventures.
Article References: Ramírez-Reveco, A., Hernández, J. L., & Aros, P. (2016). Long‐Term Storing of Frozen Semen at −196°C does not Affect the Post-Thaw Sperm Quality of Bull Semen. In Cryopreservation in Eukaryotes. InTech. https://doi.org/10.5772/64948
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