Calves play games together, copying and learning constantly. They learn where the best and sweetest water is to be found and how to nibble young shoots on the hedgerows. Like cats and dogs and people, and I suppose every other creature, calves learn whom they can trust. A calf will settle itself down under the nose of an older animal only if it knows it will not be bullied. Some bovines are bossy; they seem to need to maintain an air of dominance, even if only by an unprovoked and often fairly gentle push, while others are always good-tempered and some are quite timid. Everything in a herd of cows comes down to character: a polled cow can often deter a horned one with a mere look.
Cows and calves go about their daily lives in as many different ways as human mothers and children do. Some form such close friendships with each other that the calves do not branch out on their own for weeks. Many make firm friends with other tiny calves at only one or two days old. Generally these attachments complement the affection they have for their mothers, but they have been known virtually to replace it, as in the case of ‘the White Boys’ (see page 59), who acknowledged their dams only when they wanted milk or to be groomed.
All the cows and calves in these anecdotes have had a great deal of freedom and have never been prevented from choosing whether they want to be outside or inside. They have also had permanent access to food and water.
All unnecessary confinement and unnatural treatment of animals is indefensible. Farm animals that are allowed sufficient freedom can choose healing plants for themselves and stress-free routines that obviate the need for any routine medication. Our animals do indeed seek out the plants they sense they need. Bovines regularly go blackberry-picking in the autumn and eat young hawthorn leaves and shoots in the spring; they eat ash leaves and willow whenever they get the chance. Some will search for wild thyme and sorrel while others, at particular times of year and often depending on their stage of pregnancy, will eat large quantities of stinging nettles. Sheep will eat thistles and dock leaves voraciously by choice. In The Shepherd’s Calendar, John Clare wrote: ‘The ass … will eager stoop/ to pick the sprouting thistle up.’ Docks are deep-rooted and their leaves contain important minerals and other trace elements not readily available from shallow-rooting plants.
We decided that the animals themselves are by far the most qualified individuals to make decisions about their own welfare and it is the decisions they make, as well as many other occurrences both humdrum and extraordinary, that I have observed, learned from and written down here.
Farmers have a clear moral obligation towards their animals but it is interesting to note that the meat from animals reared extensively actually tastes better and is held by many doctors and other individuals to be better for you.
When Boswell wrote his Life of Dr Johnson, he asked ‘whether such a mind as his was not more enriched by roaming at large in the fields of literature, than if it had been confined to a single spot’, and drew the following analogy: ‘The flesh of animals who have fed excursively is allowed to have a higher flavour than that of those who are cooped up.’
In Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, the character Lord Steyne, having recently dined with the king on a joint of mutton, says, ‘A dinner of herbs is often better than a stall-fed ox.’
In more modern times, Dr Peter Mansfield has assessed the role that fat plays in our diet and whether it is responsible for the increase in heart disease. In Chemical Children, he writes:
More plausible is the suggestion that the kind rather than the amount of fat is wrong … We have already learned a lot by reflecting on the habits of our ancestors, many of whom thrived well on meat. But their animals were healthy and enjoyed a wide variety of food in all seasons. They ate grass not only young and green, but in seed a few months later. And they browsed leaves and shoots off trees as far up as they could reach. They still do, when they get the chance. But trees grow slowly, and … pastures are usually fenced-off grass enclosures nowadays. No grass gets a chance to seed … So modern animals enjoy a much narrower variety of food than their ancestors … Whole seeds and dark green leaves are conspicuous absentees. In time past these would have been their principal sources of two special fatty acids which they cannot make from any other source: linoleic acid and linolenic acid … Without these the animals do not grow … The fat composition of modern diets is clearly quite important and may prove relevant to a whole range of conditions which puzzle us now, from allergy to multiple sclerosis … Animals not bred for health prove at times not healthy enough … We should be exposed to much less immediate or potential hazard if it [meat] were grown slowly, for health rather than quantity.
The difference between intensive and organic systems of rearing and caring for hens is enormous and the gap is widening daily. For example, a bird destined to become a Sunday roast will reach its target weight in approximately 80 days in an organic system and only 42 in an intensive one. The intensively reared birds are frequently given antibiotics, to help prevent them dying from the effects of the overcrowded and unnatural conditions in which they live. They are denied fresh air and daylight, packed so tightly that exercise is virtually impossible, while the way in which breeding programmes have prioritised growth rates and size means their skeletons are often unable to support their own weight. This results in a high incidence of broken bones. Too heavy and too deformed to perch, the birds spend their lives in ammonia-soaked dung, which burns their hocks and feet.
Farmed birds should be allowed to follow their behavioural instincts, grow at their natural rate, eat safe food and live dignified lives. Almost all the pullets destined for egg production are hatched in incubators and reared in artificially heated pens. More than half of them are still transferred at ‘point of lay’ to wire-mesh cages. Here they live out their days unable to fulfil any natural function or instinct, having first had their beaks cut to deter them from pecking their cellmates out of boredom.
A hen in a natural situation would lay her eggs and sit on them until they hatched. She then would teach her chicks what to eat and how to find the food. She would guard, befriend and protect them, constantly talking to them and constantly on the look-out for danger, which, once sensed, would prompt her to round them up and hide them in double-quick time. And research shows that chicks reared without a hen are more aggressive.*
* Falt, B. (1978) ‘Differences in aggressiveness between brooded and non-brooded domestic chicks’, Applied Animal Ethology 4, 211–21.
When hens are healthy and happy, their feathers shine, their eyes are bright and alert, and they spend all day being as busy as bees: pecking, grazing, chopping, pulling, running, investigating, digging, playing and singing contentedly. If they cannot find what they need and there are humans handy they know and trust, they will come close and sing ever louder until they are noticed. Then it is up to the human being to try to work out what is wanted. This is not usually very difficult.
If hens are unhappy and unhealthy their feathers are dull; they do not sing; they moult too often. They stand hunched up and can become over-timid or over-aggressive. Health is established and maintained by giving hens what they need and poor health is invited by deprivation. It appears that when hens and pigs are confined in small spaces and given no choice about what they eat, they will eat what they are given and carry on living, however bored and frustrated they might be. If a cow or sheep were confined in a commensurately small space, I dread to think how she would cope – or indeed if she would cope at all.
It is widely accepted that animals such as cats, dogs and horses, usually kept in small numbers and given individual attention, are capable of exhibiting symptoms of boredom and unhappiness, that they can pine and grieve and show signs of feeling unwell. Hens are usually kept in such enormous flocks that monitoring individuals is impossible and it is generally considered that because they cannot attract the attention of their keeper they do not have feelings that matter.
It is perhaps easier to assume that animals have no feelings. They can then be used as generators o
f profit without any regard being given to their actual needs, as satisfying those needs is allegedly not worth the cost. Happy animals grow faster, stay healthier, cause fewer problems and provide more profit in the long run, when all factors, such as the effects on human health and the environment are taken into account. W. H. Hudson said, ‘Bear in mind … that … animals are only unhappy when made so by man.’
Bovine needs are in many respects the same as human ones: freedom from stress, adequate shelter, pure food and water, liberty to exercise, to wander about, to go for a walk or just to stand and stare. Every animal needs congenial company of its own species and a cow needs to be allowed to enjoy her ‘rights’ in her own way, in her own time and not according to a human timetable.
The number of different ways a calf may be treated is no fewer than the number of ways a child may be treated. Most people believe that children need a stable environment with warmth and comfort, good clothes and shoes, food and drink, interesting diversions, friends of their own age and adults to guide and, above all, to love them. We do not expect a well-balanced adult to emerge from a neglected, ill-nourished, lonely, frightened child. I believe we should apply the same logic to farm animals. The quality of the food and the overall environment of any living creature will determine its potential in later life.
Pigs are often described as intelligent and indeed they are. It is iniquitous criminality to keep them in confinement, preventing them from making nests and rooting in the earth. Intensive systems change them from being good-tempered, happy creatures into angry, dangerous, disturbed but still intelligent individuals.
Sheep are equally often described as stupid or silly, which they most certainly are not, as George Henderson so astutely observed in The Farming Ladder: ‘Contrary to the common opinion the sheep is by far the most intelligent of all the farm animals.’ I was once given an orphan lamb and I named her Ellen. She was brought here when just two hours old, having been given colostrum from her mother, who did not have sufficient milk to rear both her two lambs. The farmer who brought her has a distinctively deep, rough voice. Six weeks later he called again and Ellen recognised his voice and ran to him. Several years later, when I banged my knee and was hopping about in pain, she left her food and came over to me with evident compassion and would resume eating only once I had succeeded in convincing her I was no longer in pain, even though I was!
Various factors have conspired to make the keeping of large flocks of sheep essential from a financial point of view. When hundreds of sheep are all kept together it is next to impossible to identify any individual attributes, but if you make enough time to observe sheep as individuals you will see their personalities emerge and develop.
The behaviour and health of all animals is affected by the quality of food they receive and the stress to which they are subjected. Stress can be caused by the food itself. However innocuous any one chemical applied to the growing crop, or any single additive applied to the end product, foods are usually eaten in combination and the effects on health of consuming several unnatural substances together are largely unknown. With the vast majority of intensively reared animals in the UK now being fed on genetically modified soya-bean meal, only time will tell if this results in additional problems.
When there is competition for food and the weakest get insufficient they will be under additional stress, which increases the risk of disease developing. In large flocks it is very difficult to treat ill sheep individually, so mass medication is widely used, often preventatively. While this can make life easier for the shepherd, it generally increases the overall amount of medication each animal absorbs, which is one of the factors behind rising levels of resistance to some drugs.†
† Official Journal of the European Union, Commission Notice Guidelines for the prudent use of antimicrobials in veterinary medicine (2015/C 299/04).
The incidence of tuberculosis in cattle, considered by some to be caused by badgers, is an issue that comes to mind when dealing with the subject of stress, and which was noted in evidence to the House of Commons Agriculture Committee inquiry into badgers and bovine tuberculosis in 1999: ‘Cattle kept in intensively managed herds are exposed to conditions comparable to those which encourage the spread of human TB in the poorest and most overcrowded parts of the world.’
We have tried on this farm to create an environment that allows all of the animals the freedom to communicate with or dissociate themselves from us as they choose.
The seemingly mundane, day-to-day existence of a cow or a calf or of both together is perhaps not a subject that would capture everyone’s imagination. These true stories give the reader a glimpse of what goes on in the lives of ordinary bovines as they pursue their daily routine, and reveal these lives to be as full and varied as our own. Although much of the day has to be spent working (i.e. eating) to sustain themselves, time can always be found for extra-curricular activities such as baby sitting for a friend, blackberry-picking, fighting a tree or bank of earth, playing tag with a group of youngsters or a fox or quietly discussing an impending confinement with a daughter. All these activities and many more have been observed by us over the years and this selection of stories is a record of a hitherto secret world.
I have told the stories exactly as they happened but of course the interpretation of the actions of the ‘characters’ is mine. I have deliberately used personal pronouns when talking about the cows because that is how I think of them.
The Secret Life of Cows
We had always been proud of our herd of cows. We milked them, spoke to them by name, stroked them and generally enjoyed their individuality. But I was fully thirteen before I realised that they liked each other.
In 1968 we were dairy farming with a herd of pedigree Ayrshires. That summer we rented three fields on a steep, unspoiled hill four miles away and hired a lorry to take the dry cows and heifers to their summer grazing. They stayed there for three months, eating lush grass, drinking ice-cold spring water and altogether enjoying themselves. The left-at-home milkers seemed as happy as usual too. When the expiry date on the short-term tenancy on the hill drew near, we booked the same lorry and on the appointed day we brought the holidaymakers home again.
I believe all four of us noticed that for several days after the two halves of the herd had been reunited, Sunbeam and Moonbeam, mother and daughter, stood shoulder to shoulder in the yard and in the field talking over the last three months, not exhibiting any emotion but just very glad to see each other again.
They had not pined when they were parted. As a milking cow, Sunbeam had not reared her daughter and we did not even know that they recognised each other, but that demonstration of mutual affection opened our eyes to a whole new world, the world of bovine friendships.
A little bit about ingenuity
When Wizzie, also an Ayrshire, had her second calf (a chunky, pretty, short-legged strawberry roan heifer called Meg), she told her daughter she was the best and the calf believed her. Once winter set in and mud became an everyday problem, Meg made it clear that she hated getting her mahogany-coloured feet dirty. Somehow she managed to negotiate the steep flight of a dozen narrow, Cotswoldstone steps up to the granary and early one frosty-cold morning we watched her come out onto the top step, yawn and look around to see if it was worth getting up – i.e. coming down. She had spent the night in great comfort on the wooden granary floor, away from mud and draughts and bullying. We had left the granary door open because we knew that no bovine could possibly climb the steps. Subsequently she taught two friends the same trick and we used to put hay and water upstairs for them.
Alice and Jim
We stopped milking cows commercially in 1974, from then on allowing the cows to rear their own calves, but we still milked one or two cows for our own domestic consumption.
Alice became one of our house cows in 1990 and during the time we spent walking her in every day and milking her we discovered not just how intelligent, utterly kind and gentle she was but also what a sense of
fun she possessed.
Alice was big and black with a wide, intelligent forehead and large, dark eyes, and she was quick to learn the milking routine. We milked only once a day, our aim being self-sufficiency rather than quantity. Every day, in the early evening, one of us would walk to fetch the milkers. They were nearly always in their favourite L-shaped field. This field commands one of the best views on the farm, is flatter than any other field and seems to go on for ever, but we are not sure whether the view has anything to do with the preference. From the farmyard you have to walk uphill through the Walnut Tree Field, home to five 120-year-old trees, and when you reach the top, the L-shaped field stretches out before you. More often than not both the house cows would be as far away as they could possibly be. But they knew why we had come and would walk back to the farm quite happily.
Sometimes Alice would liven things up a bit and from ambling by my side she would suddenly change speed, kick up her heels and disappear out of sight. I would continue to amble with the other house cow and then several hundred yards further on would spot Alice trying to play hide and seek. She would do her best to hide behind a walnut tree but of course she was too big and as soon as she realised I had seen her she would gallop off again and hide behind the next one, and so on until we reached the cow pen.
After her year as a house cow, Alice had a three-month rest out in the fields with her friends. As it drew near the time for her to calve again, we walked her down to the barn so that we could be close at hand in case she needed help. Alice realised we had come to take her home and seemed happy to comply. However, after fifty yards or so at walking pace she suddenly accelerated and dashed off to the other side of the field. She flew over to her friend Toria and told her where she was going and why, then trotted back to where she had left us. We finished our journey home uneventfully, and the next morning Abou was born, without our assistance. Toria had Gloria a week later and all four were soon reunited with the herd.
The Secret Life of Cows Page 2