Individual cow identification is a prerequisite for intelligent dairy farming management, and is important for achieving accurate and informative dairy farming. Computer vision-based approaches are widely considered because of their non-contact and practical advantages. In this study, a method based on the combination of Ghost and attention mechanism is proposed to improve ReNet50 to achieve non-contact individual recognition of cows. In the model, coarse-grained features of cows are extracted using a large sensory field of cavity convolution, while reducing the number of model parameters to some extent. ResNet50 consists of two Bottlenecks with different structures, and a plug-and-play Ghost module is inserted between the two Bottlenecks to reduce the number of parameters and computation of the model using common linear operations without reducing the feature map. In addition, the convolutional block attention module (CBAM) is introduced after each stage of the model to help the model to give different weights to each part of the input and extract the more critical and important information. In our experiments, a total of 13 cows' side view images were collected to train the model, and the final recognition accuracy of the model was 98.58%, which was 4.8 percentage points better than the recognition accuracy of the original ResNet50, the number of model parameters was reduced by 24.85 times, and the model size was only 3.61 MB. In addition, to verify the validity of the model, it is compared with other networks and the results show that our model has good robustness. This research overcomes the shortcomings of traditional recognition methods that require human extraction of features, and provides theoretical references for further animal recognition.