The following year Alice had Jim. He was jet black with a white tail and a very high IQ. When Jim was a year old, his twin siblings, Alice II and Arthur, were born. By this time Jim had weaned himself physically and emotionally from his mother and had taken himself off into another part of the farm with his friends. He kept half an eye on his mother and when Alice brought the twins out into the sunshine for the first time and left them for a while to go and graze, Jim jumped the fence and half trotted, half marched over to introduce himself to them. They were much too small to be of any real interest to him so he turned and trotted back. Arthur, barely twelve hours old, decided to follow. His legs were still a bit unsteady but his determination not to be left behind grew with each step and we watched as he bumbled and stumbled and hurried after his big brother. Jim reached the fence, popped over and was gone. Arthur stared in unbelieving disappointment, examined the fence from every angle then slowly made his way back to his sister.
A few months later, in gloomy winter, Jim worked out a way to make each day far more interesting than it would otherwise have been. Fat Hat II was living in the same barn as Jim and, as usual, was allowed to go out whenever she asked, always choosing to head for the silage face and eat ad lib for an hour or so. Jim could not understand why he was not offered this privilege too. After watching carefully for a few days he worked out a solution that amused and amazed us all.
I was standing in the kitchen with a friend, probably drinking tea and certainly looking out of the window, when we saw Jim walk out of the yard into the field. The gate had been left open, but as it was so cold none of the others had ventured out. He walked single-mindedly away from his friends and food towards the Cherry Tree Field. It suddenly occurred to me what he was going to do, and I gave my friend a running commentary as Jim continued walking for about a hundred yards, turned 180 degrees, tiptoed over the cattle grid, walked along the road in front of the house and joined Fat Hat II at the silage clamp. Needless to say, from that day he too was allowed to go by the shorter route.
Mothers and daughters
Relationships between mothers and calves are often complicated and fascinating. Some mothers are mild and bossed about by their calves; some are overbearing; others too casual. But perhaps two of the more interesting stories concerned Dolly and Dolly II and Stephanie and Olivia.
Stephanie and her daughter Olivia enjoyed a normal, close relationship and went everywhere together until Olivia had her first calf. When the calf was due to be born, Stephanie advised and comforted Olivia and helped her choose a good spot to calve, close to clear, running water. Stephanie settled herself down at a handy but not intrusive fifty-yard distance. Olivia calved without difficulty and was immediately besotted by her beautiful cream-coloured bull calf, whom we named Orlando. She licked him dry, suckled him and quite simply doted on him. Stephanie came along a couple of hours later to be introduced and for the next few days grazed nearby hoping to be a useful and integral part of the threesome. As young calves spend a great deal of time sleeping in the first few days, grandmothers are often useful for babysitting. Sometimes cows who are not related are called on to babysit. It is quite common for one cow to look after several calves at once, but the job allocation is done democratically and cows take it in turns.
Sadly, Olivia did not want Stephanie’s services. She did not wish to stir from Orlando’s side. She ate as close to him as possible and whenever he moved she followed. She even refused her mother’s offer of grooming. She ignored her shamefully. On the fourth day Stephanie’s patience broke. Hurt and amazed, she turned tail, jumped the nearest fence and went off into another field to graze with her erstwhile friends.
To the best of my knowledge they never spoke to each other again.
The case of Dolly and her daughter was altogether different. Dolly was a wise, fairly old cow. She was dark mahogany, slim, neat and very, very clever. She had had many calves and had looked after each one superbly. She gave them four or five gallons of milk a day for several months, gradually reducing the amount over a nine- to twelve-month period so that when the time came for them to be weaned they were deriving their basic diet from grass and hardly missed the milk. She groomed every inch every day. She protected and encouraged, and told them all to be wary of human beings. ‘They are not like us,’ she told them. ‘They have their uses, occasionally, particularly for carrying hay in the winter, but there is absolutely no obligation to fraternise.’ They all heeded this advice.
Her first four calves were boys and they lived in magnificent isolation from or, more accurately, indifference to us. Dolly’s fifth calf was a girl, Dolly II.
Dolly II was very beautiful. She was as pale a gold-brown as her brothers had been dark. She had big, deerlike eyes and a sweet and trusting nature. No matter what old Dolly said or did, young Dolly liked us and liked us to like her. Sometimes we felt encouraged to give old Dolly a pat when we were stroking her calf, a sort of pat of congratulation. She would toss her head angrily as if we had forgotten the rules. Although we were pleased to be trusted by most of our cows, we admired the few who were independent from us.
When Dolly II was fifteen months old her mother had another calf and, true to previous form, devoted herself to it. Dolly II was not spurned but was increasingly ignored until she understood that as an adult she must make her own friends and leave her mother to the job she was so good at. She found it easy to make friends.
When Dolly II was getting close to having her first calf, we looked at her every day and as the time got closer we went twice and then three times a day. We always try to be on hand in case we are needed, although we seldom are. Each time she greeted us with friendly unconcern. She felt fine and could not understand our frequent visits.
We were not there when Dolly II calved. So far, nothing had ever gone wrong in her life and she did not expect it to. Instead of choosing an open, accessible place in which to calve, or walking home to ask us for help, as several young cows had done before, she went as far away from home as she possibly could and settled down, hidden from all sides by hedges and hills.
When we discovered she had disappeared, we knew why and began searching everywhere. This is quite a big farm and there are endless hiding places. If you are unlucky enough to look in all the wrong ones first it can take ages to find what you are looking for. There were five of us looking on that day and we all went in different directions with very specific orders.
Dolly II was finally found behind the hill in the Monument Field and she was a sad sight. The alarming truth was that in making a huge effort to produce, unaided, a much-too-big bull calf, Dolly had displaced her womb. The calf had been born dead, and when we found her, she was lying down, exhausted. We set to work to try to make her more comfortable. While waiting for the vet to arrive we gave her a drink of water with the chill taken off (less of a shock to her system than cold water) and covered her with a blanket. The vet arrived quickly and managed to reposition the womb and stitch it in place. We then propped her up into a sitting position with bales of hay and straw and finally left her looking relatively comfortable but still tired and seemingly unable to stand.
When we went back to see her an hour later the blanket was in a heap on the grass, the bucket was empty and tipped over and Dolly II was nowhere to be seen. We could not believe our eyes.
After much searching we found her three fields away, lying at the feet of her clever old mother being licked all over and comforted far more ably than we could ever have done. We had not seen the two Dollys talking to each other for ages and just how young Dolly knew where on the farm her mother would be we had no idea. We were glad to see that our policy of leaving gates open to allow all the stock to choose where to roam had been vindicated. At least Dolly’s slow, staggering quest had not been thwarted by five-barred wooden barriers. After six days of constant togetherness the Dollys parted again, happily, and went their own ways.
The instances where cows reject or ignore their calves are pretty rare, and in ou
r experience they are always resolved within a short space of time. As far as I can remember, the case of Olivia rejecting her mother’s friendship was unique. Here, almost every day, we see daughters consulting their mothers about impending confinements, or maybe just discussing the weather.
Recently, we were not exactly sure when young Nell was going to calve so we decided that she and her mother should spend every night in the barn during the preceding x days (x turned out to equal 9). At 4 a.m. she started to calve and her mother watched attentively. After the calf was safely delivered (this having required help from two men), Nell senior, or Gold Nell to give her her full name, came very close, head on one side, and looked at her daughter and granddaughter with great care. She decided that both were fine, and she marched towards the gate and asked to be allowed out. She had not shown even the slightest inclination to go out on any of the nights she had kept her daughter company but tonight, knowing that she was no longer needed, was different. Thereafter she maintained a very active friendship with her newly expanded family.
Jake
All of our herd bulls have been admirable and interesting individuals: Jonathan, Ivor, Tor Down Hyadal, Olé, Mr Mini, Sam and John (the identical twin sons of Constance), Wheatrig Patriot IX, Augustus and the Bishops of Gloucester and Worcester. Jake, though, was king.
Jake’s whole ancestry deserves recording. Emily, Jake’s grandmother, was a Hereford, red with a white face. She became ill when she was only a few months old. We are not sure why. It seemed as if some sort of pneumonia, with accompanying loss of appetite and breathing difficulties, had taken hold. She rapidly lost condition and looked very vulnerable. My father took her under his wing, and nursed her devotedly and knowledgeably, lying down beside her to warm her. He wrapped her in hay and gently coaxed her back to health. It took months before she felt really strong but gradually, trustingly, she began to thrive. Eventually, from being little and thin she turned into a stocky, robust, square, well-coated yet fluffy individual.
Emily’s first calf – Jake’s mother – was Nuffield. When she was born Nuffield was dark, dark brown with a white face, and for a short time we called her Emily II. After a few months, to our surprise, she appeared to be moulting and the brown hair came off and slowly but surely Emily II turned black. Her odd renaming was due to the fact that when the Leyland tractor company bought the Nuffield tractor company they painted the orange Nuffield tractors blue. After a while some of the blue paint flaked off to reveal the original orange colour; hence Emily’s new name.
We nearly despaired of Nuffield ever having a calf of her own; she just would not conceive. We had almost given up hope when we decided to give her one last chance and use artificial insemination concurrently with the herd bull.
Nuffield conceived, but it was not until nine months later that we realised she had conceived to both bulls simultaneously. She produced utterly non-identical twins, Red Ruth and Black Jake. Ruth was red with a white face and Jake was absolutely black. If we had not seen them being born we would not have believed it possible for twins to be so different. Although Emily was endearingly friendly, Nuffield was imperiously independent, and the twins were a delightful mix of these two characteristics: easy-going and trusting yet very well able to stand on their own feet. Nuffield was very proud of them, and so were we.
During the months that followed we became aware of some of the very special and unusual qualities that both Jake and Ruth possessed. They were both highly intelligent, able to work out what to do in all circumstances, and capable of asking us for help when it was needed. Jake would come up to me in the field and tug my coat with his teeth to get attention.
Ruth’s first calf was as tiny and thin and fragile as Ruth was by then four-square, robust and strong. Little Ruth needed endless, patient care for several months and we had to persuade her mother to go out without her into the fields to graze, because of course she was reluctant to leave her calf behind. She soon realised, however, that we would take care of Little Ruth and she developed her own routine of grazing for two or three hours then marching back to the barn to allow us to take some milk from her to give to the calf in a bottle. Then off she would go again. (Her behaviour presaged that of Fat Hat II, of whom more anon.) Gradually, Little Ruth gained some strength and began to accompany her mother. In the intervening time we had taught her to eat hay and had cut and carried various grasses to her. She had shown a preference for mouse-eared chickweed which we sought and brought assiduously.
Jake soon became the most important animal on the farm – not in his own opinion, however, for unlike most bulls he was not at all conceited. He was magnificent: totally black, rough coated in winter, smooth and silky in summer, always with tightly curled hair on his forehead. He had neat, strong, black feet and kind, intelligent, knowing eyes. We all loved and admired him, as did the entire herd. He was gentle and never bossy, although three times stronger than everyone else. Even a smallish animal could push him away from a flake of hay. (There are normally seventeen flakes of hay in a bale, weighing about eight pounds each.)
Jake trusted us. We never disappointed or worried him and he was a happy soul, regularly talking to his mother and, by now, three sisters. (Nuffield had produced twins again: Augusta and Octavia, who were identical heifers, black with white faces just like Nuffield herself.) We decided to keep Jake as our herd bull. He was ideal, easy to handle and perfectly safe.
One day I needed to move him right across the farm from the group he had been with all winter to another, larger group half a mile away. As it would have been a pity to uproot the whole group just to move one animal, I gently pushed Jake away from his herd in the direction of the gate that led into the wood. He turned to look at me, questioningly. I patted him more firmly and he moved forward. Through the dark wood we went, with him trusting that I would never take him anywhere he would not actually prefer, and me tapping and pushing and speaking words of praise and persuasion. We reached the gate into the paddock and Jake, polite as always, waited for me to open it, then walked heavy-footed through the stream and up the very muddy bank. He turned to question me again and I reassured him that he would be glad when we got there, accompanying my words with firm taps and pushes.
Our long and interesting walk across the farm was pleasant but unsure, because although Jake lumbered slowly, even painfully at times, giving an impression of great age and boredom, I knew he could turn on a sixpence and disappear into the distance in a split second if he felt like it. Eventually the other half of the herd came into view and Jake turned to me once more to acknowledge that he understood the purpose of the walk, before hurrying to join his new friends.
Jake did have one vice. It was not, however, a vice normally associated with bovines: he loved sniffing the carbon monoxide fumes from the Land Rover exhaust pipe. At first, we did not notice what he was doing. We were accustomed to driving into the fields, loaded to the eaves with bales of hay; ten at least inside and two or three tied on the roof rack. If it was a cold day, as so often, I would leave the engine ticking over while I leapt out to spread a bale, trying to dodge the eager heads and horns and feet. Then I would jump back in and drive forward, repeating the trick at intervals and making sure the hay was fairly distributed over a largish area so that the smaller and more timid animals had plenty of flakes to choose from and were not intimidated by those more self-assured. Jake would see us coming, stroll over to the back left-hand corner of the Land Rover and breathe in the fumes in ecstasy. We realised what he was doing only when one day in his enthusiasm he started to rub his head on the bumper while still breathing in the fumes. He seemed to get carried away and the Land Rover began to rock from side to side. Our verbal remonstrations were to no avail and when I got out to persuade him, physically, to stop I saw what he was doing. After that we always turned the engine off, however cold the weather.
Unusual behaviour needs investigating
The original Fat Hat made a lasting impact on our lives. She was a Beef Shorthorn, and
was originally named Harriet. When she was young she grew quite fat and was nicknamed Fat Hat. We were keen to increase the number of Shorthorns we had and hoped that Fat Hat would give us some daughters. She gave us nine sons in a row. Her tenth calf was a beautiful strawberry roan daughter we called Bonnet and she herself gave us eleven calves. Fat Hat’s next calf was a blue roan bull, The Blue Devil. He was a very selfish, bossy calf and the only one she did not love. She looked after him of course but was visibly relieved when he went off to play with his friends. When he was tiny he was just another calf but as soon as his character started to develop it became obvious that he was not only an independent individual but that he was difficult and demanding too. Her first nine boys, all red and all friendly to her but not to us, had all been called Ronnie. Fat Hat’s twelfth calf was another strawberry roan heifer called Straw Béret and her last calf was yet another roan called Fat Hat II.
Fat Hat was a remarkable cow in many ways. She preferred men to women and she did not like men much. She never needed or asked for anything: no help to calve, no extra food. She was never ill. In fact she was nearly twenty before she needed us.
I found her one warm summer’s day in the yard when all the rest of the herd were a long way off, grazing. Unusual behaviour needs investigating and as I approached her I could see that she had plain fencing wire wrapped round all four feet. My immediate thought was that even if I had a team of helpers she would be very difficult to restrain and would probably struggle and tighten the wire. I was on my own with no immediate prospect of help, yet she seemed to be asking me to come to her aid – the first time she had ever needed a human being. I bent down, talking to her as reassuringly as I could, and took hold of a piece of the wire. She did not move a muscle. I began to untwist it, aware all the time that she might kick out. It was as if she knew that I could succeed in this difficult task only if she were totally cooperative. She stood perfectly still while I unwrapped and unwound, straightened and removed piece after piece of wire. I had to lift each of her feet in turn and out of turn. It took quite a long time but eventually she was free. Before marching back out into the field she turned and looked at me. I like to think it was a sort of grudging admission that humans do occasionally have their uses.
The Secret Life of Cows Page 3