A little bit on names and more on grieving
All our animals have names, of course, and many have nicknames. Often the nicknames become so dominant that we forget the original names. Terms of endearment aside, the first of this group I remember was Highnoon IX. She had been a solid, unremarkable cow until she produced an unusually marked red-and-white bull calf who bumbled about instead of walking, in a cross between a stroll and a lumber. Bumble became quite an eye-catcher and his mother became known as Mrs Bumble and the Bumble suffix endured. Just over a year later Mrs Bumble had a heifer calf, Miss Bumble, who in turn had twin heifer calves, the Misses Bumble. Eventually and by an extraordinary route the first Miss Bumble became known as Granny.
When the Misses Bumble were nearly three years old, they both produced red bull calves. To recognise their new status we renamed them Mrs Ogmore and Mrs Pritchard after the characters in Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood. It was the long, not-too-cold winter of 1989 and we had a whole bunch of young calves: Amelia, Dreamy, Eleanor, Ninette, Horatio (Nell’s son), Laura, Edward … Every day, depending on the weather, these calves went either up to the L-shaped field (their favourite) to graze or down into the Poplar Wood. They played by the stream and among the young ash trees and fallen poplar branches and by one uprooted tree, which provided endless fascination.
Although the cows and calves spent the nights in the barn where there was ad-lib hay to eat, we always took extra hay out into the fields during the day because, although they grazed the grass, in winter it has very little goodness in it. One day as we drove across the L-shaped field to distribute hay, we saw, to our horror, Mrs Pritchard lying dead in the middle of the field. Pritchard, her three-week-old son, was standing by her in bewildered amazement. The post-mortem revealed that death had been caused by an abscess on her liver, probably the result of a knock she had received, unnoticed, months or even years before, which had suddenly and unpredictably burst.
For many years we have observed the depth of emotional and physical attachment that cows and calves feel for each other. We have noted that a cow grieves for a dead calf far longer than a calf for its mother. It is possible to diminish the grieving of both. It is important for a cow to be able to ‘talk to’ other members of her immediate family. It also helps if we provide different, tempting, food. A calf also needs to communicate with relatives and friends. Extra attention from us in the form of food, grooming and sometimes the distraction of a change of surroundings can help to speed the process of forgetting. A lot depends on the age of the calf and we have developed different strategies for different ages. When Lotte’s mother died, her older sister Charlotte took Lotte under her wing so devotedly that the calf accepted the new situation surprisingly quickly. Pritchard, however, did not appear to have made any particular friends, although he was definitely one of the gang. A young calf’s main pre-occupation is with hunger, but the older the calf the more it misses its mother. With much cosseting and grooming and handling and spoiling, however, even a six-monthold calf will appear to have forgotten its mother within a week, and often within three days.
Pritchard was much more hungry than lonely but it took a great deal of canny and patient persuasion to make a bottle of milk acceptable to him. By the third of his small, frequent feeds, however, we were already firm friends and I could see the next ten months mapped out before me in terms of warming bottles full of milk, long conversations and plenty of brushing and combing.
We decided to leave Pritchard with the herd. Although he would be dependent on us we were determined for him to keep his identity as a member of the group. Often it would be almost midnight when I trundled up the hill with his last feed, champagne bottles of warm milk clanking at my sides. Pritchard never took a step towards me, but stood stock-still wherever he was and waited for me to find him. Sometimes it was easy. Sometimes every other red bull calf in the field seemed to be trying to impersonate him: Ogmore, Jack, Horatio all stood quietly, allowed me to offer them milk in the midnight dark and, with what I fancied were amused smiles, steadfastly declined. Sometimes Pritchard would be standing behind a tree and there he would stay until I found him. I am sure he was not hiding, but merely waiting, absolutely confident that I would be able to locate him.
When Pritchard was four months old, the original Miss Bumble (Pritchard’s grandmother) calved and had a tiny, black daughter we called Dot. Miss Bumble had more milk than Dot could drink and so she decided, without any encouragement from us, to adopt Pritchard. Pritchard’s ‘Granny’, so we believe, knew who he was, having presumably been introduced by her daughter before she died. She was dry at that time and could do nothing practical to help. As soon as she had calved and was producing milk she invited Pritchard to be brought up with Dot. Dot and Pritchard became inseparable friends and Granny was a wonderful mother to them both.
My job as stand-in mother continued part-time for a while and I offered milk twice a day for the next fortnight but Pritchard made it clear that he could not drink another drop. He had, though, become addicted to being groomed, and although Granny licked him daily he still liked me to brush him.
A brief note about sleep
All the words and phrases we humans use for sleep – dozing, catnapping, resting, having a bit of shut-eye, and so on – could equally apply to cows and sheep and hens and pigs.
If animals feel totally relaxed and safe and know themselves to be in a familiar environment, surrounded by family and friends, they will often sleep lying flat out. They flop in a variety of often amusing positions and look anything from idyllically comfortable to dead. The sleep may sometimes last only a very short time, but we feel that it is important and that they should not be disturbed. It might sound eccentric to suggest that the reason an animal is bad-tempered is because it is short of sleep but as sleeping is vital, deprivation will obviously do harm. The animals can make up for deficiencies in their diet by foraging and finding what they need. It is up to us to provide conditions in which they can be comfortable and happy enough to sleep well.
Some of our cows have horns. Some grow downwards; some grow straight out to the sides, often achieving great length, and some grow uphill like pitchforks. I am not sure how they do it, but when cows decide to sleep flat out, none of them let their horns get in their way.
Often a cow or calf will appear in every limb, breath and eye to be sleeping soundly but a telltale, radar-dish ear will appear and rotate slightly, monitoring and analysing every footstep, creak and groan. If reassured, an even deeper sleep might follow – chewing jaws stop moving, whiskers stop twitching, and watchful, sleepy eyes disappear from view. Two minutes pass or three and the antenna scans the airwaves again. Up and down and round, this instinctive agent of survival seems programmed to receive sufficient advance warning of impending harm.
If cows are in a group of animals they do not know very well, they may choose to catnap in a seated, folded position, ready to wake and perhaps jump up at a second’s notice. Or there may be occasions when they are a bit squashed and have tucked themselves up in a small space, next to a friend or relative, happy and secure but with no room to lie flat. In these cases, contentment shows on their faces and their eyes refuse to stay open before they fall asleep almost unwittingly.
There are lots of in-between examples too. Much depends on whether the animals are in a barn or out in the field. If there is a strong wind out in the open, and even if they do not feel at all cold, they will probably elect not to lie flat out but might adopt a curious chin-on-knee position or curl their heads round as a pigeon would. Many of the bovines here use their friends as headrests. Some of the older cows will gather their children and grandchildren around them at night, especially out in the open air.
Pigs, if given a comfortable, well-equipped home, will burrow to comfort or abandon themselves to sleep in an enviable way. Sheep can be as varied as any animal but I have never seen them quite flop to the extent that cattle do – this is possibly because they sense the danger of becoming cas
t, a farming term for an animal lying on its back, unable to move. Unless the animal is found in time this can be fatal. At night, hens often tuck their heads into their wing feathers in true birdlike fashion. During the daytime they can appear to be asleep when enjoying the extraordinary ecstasy of sunbathing. They spread their feathers wide to expose the maximum area to the sun, tip drunkenly to one side in order to stretch one leg and, in this uncomfortable-looking, stiff state, proceed to enjoy quite prolonged sessions of rigid relaxation.
If any sense of fear is aroused then none of the animal kingdom will sleep. If the source of fear is remote, cows will communicate to very young calves that they can sleep while the older animals keep guard. At least, this is how it seems to us after decades of observation.
The security and stability provided by extended family groups has far-reaching benefits. In stressful conditions where there is competition for food or lack of space or too few water troughs, it appears far more likely that an animal will succumb to illness. The converse obviously means that living at ease with access to food and water and the reassuring fact of having friends and relatives always on hand seems a fine bolster against ill-health.
Different kinds of mooing
One thing that has always seemed of interest to the various students and farm workers here over the years is learning to distinguish between different kinds of mooing. After relatively few lessons or descriptions some have taken pride in relating incidents where recognising the importance of a certain type of mooing had resulted in good decisions being made. Cows moo for various reasons and sometimes for no (apparent) reason.
One day a man who had been with us only for a short time came rushing to the kitchen to tell me that a cow was mooing in a very loud and agitated way and asked me to go with him to ascertain what was wrong. To have left the kitchen at that moment would have resulted in burned biscuits so I forced him to delve into his hitherto untapped powers of description to describe the cow in sufficient detail for me to know who it was and to describe the mooing more precisely. I judged that she was not distressed but merely cross at having temporarily lost sight of her calf. I gave him a foolproof visual description of the calf and he was then able to reunite the pair.
As I have already said, cows moo for various reasons: fear, disbelief, anger, hunger or distress. Each cow, moreover, has her own method of asking a question, either with a look or a strange, quiet moo.
Sometime after midnight on a very cold night in February I was wrenched from a deep, tired sleep by a cow mooing. It was not a moo of annoyance or boredom; it did not signify hunger or pain. It was a moo of absolute determination. Determination not just to wake me up but to make me get up and go out, and immediately. I did not know then that it was Araminta. I simply knew that I must hurry both for her sake and to save the rest of the family from being woken.
I grabbed my towelling robe and plunged down the back stairs by feel, reached the basement, pulled on my Wellingtons, no time for socks, realised it was raining, snatched my mac and ran up the steps and along the path, trying to button up and feel my way between the bushes simultaneously. Araminta was still mooing. I wanted her to stop mooing more than I wanted a torch so I headed for the noise. It was very, very black dark. Saying kind, solicitous words, I discovered by touch who she was and that her udder was full of milk. I guided her towards the cow pen, hoping that she would stop calling as soon as the pressure in her udder was alleviated. I knew as we walked that her son, The Don (in memory of Sir Donald Bradman) must either be ill or dead, because her milk had not been drunk all day. I knew, too, that her penetrating moo was not just to tell me she was uncomfortable but that I must do something to help her son, since she could not.
When I had fed and milked her, I picked up a torch and explained that she must show me where The Don was. When our cows do give us credit for intelligence they tend to make the mistake of presuming that we know everything, and after I had opened the cow-pen door and pushed Araminta out, she just stood still. I was afraid she might start mooing again to remind me to find her son, so I pushed her in one direction, in a fairly businesslike way, as if I knew where we were going. Trustingly she complied with my instructions. After fifty yards I stopped. She stopped. I gently turned her round and pushed her back the way we had come. This made her realise at once that I had not got a clue where we were going and she turned herself round and marched off in the original direction at twice the speed. I followed.
We found The Don three fields away. He was standing up but looked very sorry for himself. He was severely ‘blown’, and in such circumstances death can be sudden. He was reluctant to move but I forced him to walk home, his mother walking by his side. When we reached the yard, I put him in the cattle crush to keep him still and fetched the long rubber tube we kept for such eventualities. Opening his jaw with my left hand I gradually eased the pipe down his oesophagus and into his stomach. Holding the end of the tube in my right hand I massaged the left side of his abdomen with the other until eventually the trapped air was released.
Although I cured The Don for that night and he and his clever old mother snuggled down in the straw in the barn, his problem recurred. With veterinary approval the same course of action was repeated time after time but it finally became necessary for the vet to perform a small operation. In the end The Don did make a complete recovery but only after almost two months. Strangely, he appeared happy throughout his ordeal: when in discomfort, he stopped eating and drinking, but did not seem distressed and only minutes after being treated he was eating and drinking again as if nothing had happened.
Cows make good decisions
As I have already said, Old Fat Hat’s first daughter was called Bonnet and Bonnet produced eleven calves, of whom Roan Bonnet, Little Bonnet, Peter Bonnetti, and Gold Bonnet are notable. Roan Bonnet’s first calf was called the Bishop of Durham. For some reason she did not take motherhood all that seriously and although she did most of the right things – feeding, grooming and staying with him – she was a bit half-hearted, decidedly not over-protective and produced only a small amount of milk.
Consequently, Durham was psychologically balanced but rather small and slow-growing. We decided that he needed some extra food, and since it was late autumn and there was no grass to graze worth speaking about, once a day Durham was given a feed of home-grown barley and a couple of hours away from all the other cattle to eat hay at his leisure. He very soon learned to tell the difference not only between men and women but also between two similarly sized men. He never asked the same person twice for food on the same day but if a different person approached him he would try pretending for all he was worth that he had not been fed that day. Quite often this procedure worked. After Durham, Roan Bonnet had the Earl of Warwick, and then the Duke of Lancaster, whereby hangs another tale (see p. 74).
We have found over the years that if they are allowed the right conditions to live in, cattle make very good decisions. They need access at all times to shelter, pure water and good food, freedom from stress and a level of stability. If the weather forecast predicts rain but the cattle insist on staying out on the exposed pastures in midwinter, or if in the middle of June with weather supposedly set fair, they come down to the barns and ask to be let in, we do well to take heed. One June evening they all came crowding in just before a torrential storm that took everyone else by surprise. A few hours later, at 1.30 in the morning, it became dry and very mild and they were determined to go back out to graze. They made their wishes known vociferously enough to wake all the villages around. We dutifully and hurriedly got up and were taking them down the road to some more interesting pasture when we were stopped and questioned by an amazed policeman. We were tempted to say that we were merely taking the herd for their usual late-night stroll.
I have talked about the importance of ensuring that animals have permanent access to shelter. All sorts of structures can play a part: trees, banks, walls and barns each have a role. However, the most important and versatile living
shelter is a hedge.
Many writers past and present have written lyrically about the multi-purpose hedge. Every old hedge has a story to tell, it being possible to calculate from inspection when a hedge was planted. It is also possible to deduce why it was planted where it is.
The madness of removing hedgerows cannot be overstated. The many thousands of miles that have been destroyed have resulted in far more than mere visual deprivation: gone too are roses of amber, white and several shades of pink cascading from the topmost boughs in May and June, resulting later in berries of every hue. Innumerable wild species rely on these ‘little lines of sportive wood run wild’, as Wordsworth called them. Birds have skyscraper dormitories and layered nesting sites, not to mention their life-sustaining winter larder. A hedge that is old enough provides rosehip, plum, elderberry, crab apple, haw, nut, sloe, acorn, ash keys and honeysuckle berries. Timid creatures find safe havens, nipping easily through the barbed blackberry skirts to escape the fearless badger. Rabbits, dormice and field voles all find their hidey-holes and the vulnerable ground-nesting birds have an enhanced chance of survival.
The Secret Life of Cows Page 4