Cows groom their calves and sometimes, when they are older, calves will groom their mothers in return but quite a lot of grooming goes on every day between animals with no obvious connections. If a cow offers another cow the top of her head, bowed and submissive, she will almost always receive a grooming session in return. (A warning display of aggression with the head held in an almost identical position but with muscles tense and head bowed might appear indistinguishable to a casual onlooker.) All the animals know, without turning round, whether the one walking behind them is friendly or not. I suppose this is not surprising: we all knew in the school playground if friends or enemies were near.
Carrying a brush so that you are always ready to groom a cow can have huge benefits. Apart from the calming effect it can have on a disturbed individual, a situation where some foreign object lodged in a foot might otherwise necessitate a long and painful journey home can often be resolved if the surprise and subsequent pleasure of a grooming affords an opportunity to remove the offending object.
Although some children, like Dizzy II, look after their mothers, some are very selfish. Every day for more than a month now I have been watching a grooming routine take place outside the kitchen window. Laura and her son emerge from their night quarters as soon as the weather tempts them forth and invariably pause within my view for half an hour while mother meticulously grooms son. When she has finished she asks him to groom her in return. He tries hard to refuse and usually succeeds.
Laura lowers her head and pushes him gently; you can almost see the look of disbelief and boredom on his face. He moves away a few inches; she stretches her head towards him. Once in a while he will give her two licks and then stop. She tries every tactic; he remains unmoved. After a time she will bunt his dewlap and push him a bit harder. He bestows one more lick and then asks her to groom him again. At first she refuses but she always gives in. The performance is repeated day after day.
A word about milk
Calves and cows vary as much as people in growth rate, temperament, ingenuity and affection. One interesting factor that might affect growth rate is the marked difference in the taste of milk from different cows. Of course this might have no effect at all but it is nonetheless interesting.
As we are largely self-sufficient in food, we notice the taste of milk probably more than the calves do. They always have the same milk, whereas we taste milk from many cows. It is well known that the milk from different breeds of cow has its own distinctive characteristics of taste and quality. A change in diet will also affect milk taste but there is an inherent difference and we have found that even cows of the same age and breed can produce milk with vastly different tastes and widely variable butterfat contents. In the house we label the milk jugs with the cows’ names and we all have our particular preferences.
Calf games
Differences in temperament have become apparent throughout these stories, but I have not yet commented on the behaviour of very young calves. Mersey II, long-awaited daughter of Mersey, last daughter of Meuse, herself one of almost identical twins born in 1969, was a born leader in the realm of calf-game invention. Mr Mint, Dorothy and Seal were all born in December 1994 and little Mersey did not join the gang until 22 February 1995. The gang of three had been relentless in their pursuit of fun and even on bitingly cold days they would do handstands, and leap and skip, and fight their boring, grazing mothers. All of this peep show took place right outside the kitchen window in the newly fenced paddock. Day after day we vowed to buy a video camera but the days passed and the calves gradually slowed down and began to spend more time eating than playing. Then along came Mersey. Her tiny, dull-gold daughter with head held high and an inability to walk at less than a prance decided to show the others what speed really meant. Her prowess and enthusiasm inspired all around her and fresh life was injected into the threesome with new, astonishing games invented by the minute.
As calves get older and genuinely need to spend most of the day eating, they develop a routine for games at dusk. Sometimes the momentum created involves the ‘teenagers’ and sometimes even the ‘old ladies’ themselves. This is the time of night when we have seen calves playing tag with a fox, chasing pheasants and organising heats in race-me-to-your-mother-and-back with the eventual winner leading a lap of honour round the perimeter of the field. There have been many pack leaders over the years: Lochinvar, Isadora, Carpet, Anne, Woolly Bully, Jack, and many taggers-along too.
New moons and full moons punctuate the hurrying months and Gold Belinda has just produced Little Black Belinda but so far has not spoken one word to her. Yet again we humans have the responsibility and delight of providing all the affection and grooming while her mother supplies the milk, which Little Belinda sneaks from behind while her mother is busy eating. Sometimes, when she sees us approaching with grooming brushes in our hands, she is so excited that she starts to bounce on all fours, and gets so carried away that she bounces right past us, then suddenly remembers and rushes back again.
Hens like playing too, and I shall turn to them in a minute. First I must attempt to write about Amelia.
Amelia
Amelia was an unusually delightful calf, more trusting and understanding than we would have thought possible, while her mother was offhand to say the least. From day one, Amelia did everything slowly. She seemed thoughtful. When the gate was opened and all her contemporaries rushed eagerly to the next adventure, Amelia would take her time and emerge, when she felt like it, sometimes when the others were nearly out of sight. She made a mental note of everything, as we were later to find out.
I could write for a thousand pages, listing every detail of Amelia’s life, and I still would not have presented an even half-accurate picture of her. She had to cope with the vicissitudes of life, and after giving birth to dead twins her grieving was far more acute than any we had ever witnessed. She needed to be milked each day and during the succeeding year developed a strong friendship with my brother who bent over backwards in an effort to console and divert her. She has always been loving, and though I give her a love only if she looks as if she wants me to, my brother Richard gives her love whether she wants him to or not.
When Richard had officiated at the birth of Nell’s beautiful Hereford calf, he went straight over to talk to her calf of the previous year to compensate him for no longer occupying centre stage in his mother’s affections. My mother was watching this and noticed that Amelia was watching too. As soon as Richard had finished talking to Nelson my mother told him that Amelia had been watching, somewhat jealously. Richard went straight to apologise to her but as soon as he got near she tossed her head in high dudgeon, turned her back on him and walked off. Richard went after her, grabbed her round the neck and gave her a determined bear-hug then held out his hand for reconciliation. Amelia hesitated for a second then licked his hand and said, slightly huffily, that he was forgiven.
After Amelia had the dead twins, because she had produced so much milk in readiness, she needed to be milked for her own comfort. Richard had to go away from home most days and Amelia was happy for me to bring her near home each evening but once we reached the brow of the hill overlooking the farmstead she stopped and insisted on hanging around until Richard returned. She grazed and chatted to her friend but kept an eye out for his little red car. As soon as he drove up the farm road she ambled down and waited in the yard for him. She never mistook any other red car for his.
AMELIA
Patient, loving, knowing Amelia.
Proud, strong, clever, wise,
Able, sure but unconceited.
Endless time for loving your children and us
When we deserve it.
Made noble, brave by pain of loss
Quick to be grateful and happy again.
Straight back, broad muzzle, wide forehead,
Bright eyes, strong legs, well-placed udder,
To all of convention’s technical requirements you conform.
Ability to be loved and to be
loving,
To make friends, play jokes, take offence,
Solve problems, hog the limelight,
Educate your offspring, be almost too clever sometimes.
Assessing character, distinguishing people,
Not suffering fools at all.
Persevering, being brave, hanging on or
Marching to complain if human intervention’s right.
No conceit, one of the herd. Merging in.
Yet standing out, for us, a mile and
Welcoming us into your world.
Hens like playing
Hens like playing. In fact that is all they ever do, apart from eating, which they also seem to do non-stop. They enjoy everything, sing happy little songs and just have fun. From the minute they are let out in the morning they embark on adventures. These include pecking their way to and round and through all the barns, pecking up and round and over all the bales of hay, onto and over the self-feed silage (which term they take literally) ending up in mid-to late afternoon ranged along the top of the wall outside the kitchen window sunbathing, or dustbathing under one of the bushes. They are, however, not over fond of rain.
In the winter the Land Rover is loaded up with hay and the hens try their hardest to cadge a lift. They know they are not supposed to so they peck round the wheels nonchalantly and wait for an opportunity when our backs are turned. One will usually manage to jump in and hide among the hay, and once, when the engine was running and we did not hear the triumphant singing, a hen got away with it and was not discovered until the hay was being unloaded hen-miles away up in the fields. She tumbled out with a bale of hay and the wind buffeted her this way and that. The cows formed a circle of surprise round her but she was not at all intimidated. I picked her up and lifted her into the front of the vehicle, where she stood on the seat and looked round her like a queen on an official drive-about. I resumed the hay distribution and found an egg.
Hens enjoy human company and our hens hate to be left out of apparently interesting conversations. On one occasion we had a large group of French agricultural students here and they had gathered in a ring to learn about crop rotation. The hens felt deliberately excluded and pushed into the centre of the melee. They stretched up to make themselves as tall and noticeable as possible and tried to take part in the conversation the only way they know, by singing loudly.
There’s another side to hens
One day I found old Grey Hen on the ground unable to move. The fox had eaten two of her friends and had damaged her leg severely. She was given medical attention and her leg was bandaged. For three days she ate nothing, however tempting, just taking frequent, small sips of water. On the fourth morning she ate a piece of bread and from then on never looked back, consuming every imaginable delicacy we could think of: raspberries and cream, butter, cheese, wheat, barley, milk, bread and dripping (her favourite), cooked beef, raisins, etc. During the first four days and, as it turned out, for more than a year after, our other two hens exhibited such genuine, loving and altruistic behaviour that we found ourselves marvelling.
They became her devoted bodyguards. When food was offered, they would stand by and watch until she had eaten all she wanted and only then would they eat themselves. They would walk about, pecking and investigating things but every few minutes one or both of them would hurry back to Grey Hen’s side to see if she was all right. They comforted her by gently moving their beaks up and down hers. She did not mind them enjoying themselves but became anxious if they went completely out of sight. The two friends, sisters of the same age and much younger than the ‘invalid’, had not been particularly friendly to the old hen before her trauma. She was truly the éminence grise and perhaps they had been kept in line by her to a certain extent. But as soon as she was no longer able to fend for herself they changed utterly.
During all this time she did not move. She sat in a nest of hay in the garden all day and in a different nest in their pen at night. She learned how to ask to be carried to different locations in the garden by craning her neck in the direction her friends had gone, and by looking at us and ‘speaking’ in a quite unusual and unmistakable voice.
When the day came for the bandage to be removed we had quite a shock: her foot came off in my hand. Grey Hen, however, seemed greatly relieved. The sterile environment inside the bandage had allowed her stump to heal perfectly and as soon as she was replaced in her daybed she promptly walked off. I exaggerate here; she limped off, but so happy to have lost the dead weight on the end of her leg. She used her wings for balance and moved around at will, though still asking to be carried up steps and, to begin with, across the roadway to bed. After a few weeks the end of her stump became sufficiently hardened to make her confident of crossing the concrete roadway herself. Sometimes she would fairly dash across before we could dream of intervening and sometimes she would stay on the soft lawn and ‘require’ one of us to carry her. She knew whom she could trust.
After years and years of keeping hens we finally had occasion to get involved in their everyday lives. Of all farm animals, hens are usually, if given freedom and access to a wide variety of food and lots of pure water, the most independent creatures and happy to be so. However these three learned how to ‘use’ us, to our delight and their benefit.
The accident had happened in the spring and once Grey Hen was mobile again she had the summer to look forward to. She hated to miss out on anything but whenever it rained she hid under the garden hammock and if the rain was heavy we brought her in the house. Her friends knew where she was and carried on as usual but when bedtime approached they simply would not go across the roadway to bed without her.
Grey Hen soon accepted the situation: rain equals incarceration. I think she actually enjoyed the comfort. By now she was eating and drinking like a horse and apart from the noisy activity of pecking wheat from a container she was always silent until she decided it was time to go home. If one of us was close at hand she would need only to start manoeuvring towards the door to make her wishes clear. If, however, we were not handy she would resort to whatever tactics she thought necessary to attract our attention.
She would try her special speaking voice first. (She had given up singing.) Once, when that failed, she sidled over to the metal saucepan drawer under the cooker and banged more and more loudly with her beak until we heard. We never kept her waiting again.
Grey Hen enjoyed everything. She grazed the grass on the lawn voraciously; she investigated or dozed or weeded the rose bed; her friends scratched the earth with their feet and she ate whatever they turned up. Even when they had forgotten to be so polite about food allocation she could always beat them for speed with eye and beak, even if they could still run.
For twenty months Grey Hen thrived but then came the day we had all been waiting for. She ate a modest breakfast but showed no interest in food at lunchtime. She seemed off balance and hung her head. She died with her two close friends and two newer friends whom we had bought a few months after her injury by her side.
The question of whether a hen can grieve had never previously occurred to us. The answer is ‘yes’. We wondered whether the two bodyguards would miss their old friend but as we were to see during the succeeding days and weeks, all four were affected.
All the hens had appeared to be happy during the summer but we now know that they had restricted their activities to suit Grey Hen’s capabilities. They had turned into couch potatoes.
For the first few days after her death the four hens deliberately congregated in ‘her’ erstwhile corner of the pen every night. After about a week they did some spring-cleaning and we found to our surprise that the nest and the sack under it had been cleared away and the whole corner turned over and tidied. They were all subdued and shied away from human contact for some time. They also ate a great deal less.
Very gradually they began to resume active life and became more adventurous by the day. We would spot them in unaccustomed locations: down by the pond, in the yard with the cows, d
own behind the pig pens. Each day they roamed further afield, although we had felt certain that they had been happily suited to the confines of the garden. After three weeks they started laying eggs, resumed their friendly-to-human dispositions and insisted on staying up very late, talking and eating and playing in their pen for at least four hours longer than when the old girl had been one of their number.
Amelia again
Amelia is an important and significant animal who deserves another mention.
It was she who, when very young, persuaded or enabled a hardened-in-his-ways farm worker to like and enjoy the company of cows – finally, and to his immense delight.
He had been taught to talk gruffly to cows, hurry them, let them know who was boss; he had in fact been taught to be afraid of them while never admitting it. He came here for the first time when he was sixty-two to help with a particular job but asked if we had any more part-time work. He was a skilled gardener, so part-time days stretched into mutually beneficial years.
One day when a group of cows and calves (the class of ’89) was meandering out for the day, he came to ‘help’, in a hurrying, anxious, domineering way. I told him he could leave Amelia to find her own way to the field because she liked to investigate absolutely everything en route: stones, bushes, rabbits, people, cars, hens, flowers. Very gradually, his astonishment began to subside and when I added that he could give her a stroke if he liked, he did not do so immediately but went back later. She was only two months old at the time but their friendship had begun and over the next few years he grew to appreciate the members of the whole herd as the diverse and rewarding individuals they are.
The Secret Life of Cows Page 8