In the interest of complete historical accuracy, I have to mention one more Amelia-related incident.
One winter’s day when she was eleven, I found her alone with sixteen large round bales of hay. It was more than likely that the gate had been left open and that she was not therefore guilty of breaking and entering, but I nevertheless needed to remove her before she flattened them all (flattening big bales being a favourite game of every bovine if offered the opportunity). Perhaps she was extremely reluctant to move because she had only just arrived, but her instinct to be obedient when faced with a polite request became momentarily clouded and I could see for about a minute that she was in a dilemma. I feel quite certain that she contemplated removing the obstacle to happiness, i.e. me, by pinning me against a wall with her head and perhaps squashing some sense into me. She is a very big and powerful cow and we each stood our ground, looking at each other; there was no escape route and I was frightened. I growled at her to obey and I fancy I could see the thought processes at work. She considered her options and decided against grievous bodily harm. The angry expression that had taken hold of her face relaxed and she turned and walked out of the barn. I immediately furnished her with an armful of the desired hay and she was completely her old self again.
A brief note on birds
All birds are happy, clever creatures. In my experience they all seem to learn by their mistakes and most never seem to make any. Birds always know what the weather is going to do long before anyone else, particularly the Meteorological Office.
From very close quarters we have been able to watch their learning process – or is it part of evolutionary adaptation? Our grandstand view is allowed by the fact that in winter we fill smallish round, plastic cups with breadcrumbs and molten fat which, when set hard, we invert on thin bean canes.
The blue tits learn how to feed from them within minutes, hanging upside-down with ease. Word fairly soon spreads among the rest of the tit population and the cups are visited by marsh, willow, coal and great tits, all of whom devise satisfactory feeding methods within a relatively short time. The chaffinches, on the other hand, begin by being quite cross. They shout at the cups and seem to expect a solution to present itself. After a while they decide to launch themselves in a sidelong direction from the nearest convenient cotoneaster bough and, if lucky, they grab a small beakful. After one or two weeks they hit on the idea of imitating humming birds and approach the cups with beaks outstretched and wings beating desperately fast. This technique is eventually perfected and the ‘new’ species becomes a regular and successful feeder.
The robin is next to pit his wits and the whole business gives him serious concern. He tries again and again to hang on to the cups long enough to feed but with no luck. We do of course provide liberal supplies of more readily available food and the robin, among others, partakes of this, absent-mindedly, while contemplating the problem of the cups, which were put there in the first place only to ensure that at least some food remained safe from the maggot-pies (as Shakespeare calls them in Macbeth), jackdaws and jays. The best the robin could ever manage was to screw himself into a tight ball on the ground directly under the cup and leap vertically, snatching a small amount of food and immediately giving it to his not-quite-so-clever friend who was waiting down below. These spasmodic leaps continued intermittently for a few weeks, then ceased altogether. It was not until May, when the jackdaws were obsessively feeding their young, that one of them learned how to shin up the bean cane and plunder the contents. At about the same time a fox also decided to join in and took the cup away wholesale.
Self-medication
My rather rash statement that ‘homeopathy … merits a whole chapter in our lives as farmers’ is one I shall now modify. While we try to maintain open minds on most subjects and seldom see things as merely black or white, homeopathy has not in fact yet played a very big part in our husbandry techniques.
The adherence to a single method of treating ill animals, whether using so-called conventional modern drugs or homeopathic preparations, herbs, acupuncture, or any of the many other alternative therapies, does not seem appropriate. We try to maintain and promote health and well-being by providing the right living conditions and diet but where something unforeseeable occurs we are willing to try many and varied options and whenever it is necessary we do not hesitate to call the vet and use whatever is prescribed to prevent suffering.
The interesting subject of self-medication in the animal kingdom has until very recently been regarded with scepticism by many scientists but the weight of evidence from observation in the field now makes it impossible to deny that this not unsurprising phenomenon occurs frequently. Because our animals range freely they can and do help themselves to a wide variety of plants.
Undoubtedly taste preferences and curiosity account for some of the nibbling and browsing but I feel certain that when the occasion demands it our animals seek out plants that can help them to recover from illness or injury.
I have mentioned that cows and sheep sometimes eat large quantities of willow, stinging nettles, thistles and ash. The cattle are delighted if ever a tree of any species falls down. Our hens have been seen gorging on digitalis and greater burdock leaves; they may then abstain from both for long periods. Herbal tea made from Euphrasia officianalis (eyebright) has greatly improved my own hearing, but there were no detectable signs of improvement for nearly three weeks. It was well worth the wait, and although it is so tempting to opt for the immediate ‘cure’ or reduction in pain that modern drugs offer, I am hopeful that this slow, helping-the-body-to-help-itself approach might prove more lasting.
My brother Richard wrote in Country Life:
Any open-minded practitioner would recognise the fault of modern veterinary medicine in ignoring environmental causes of disease. These are often related to farming systems and the financial pressures which perpetuate them. Vets know there is little use in prescribing fresh air and exercise for a sickly animal locked into a factory farming system. Nevertheless, what makes it particularly hard for the majority to accept homeopathy is the belief that remedies become more potent with greater dilution.
His article was written from a sceptic’s perspective of homeopathy, and as this is a farming partnership, we need to find a degree of common ground before contemplating any new ideas. Nevertheless, we are learning gradually and have witnessed some startling recoveries as well as some apparent non-events.
We do, however, applaud the finer points of homeopathic diagnosis. For example, a sweet-natured cow might be prescribed one preparation while a bad-tempered one would be offered something totally unrelated for the same condition. This illustrates graphically that homeopathy recognises and treats animals as individuals. It concerns us greatly that mass medication is so often used in the human and animal kingdoms; vaccines are widespread and no account seems to be taken of individual susceptibilities or the state of immune systems or natural defence mechanisms.
An equally reassuring atmosphere pervades herbalism and several other alternative therapies with which I have come into albeit tenuous contact. The misuse of modern drugs, whether by ignorance or design, has alarming consequences, and it is absolutely certain that intensive factory farming could not continue without an armoury of drugs to keep alive the poor creatures whose quality of life in such systems is non-existent.
Our animals go out of their way to find what they feel they need, and by this I mean actually walking away from the herd in their search. They sometimes pass a more than adequate supply of water on their way to a less handily situated source, which has perhaps a particular mineral content or is a very different temperature.
If given the choice, all farm animals are fussy about the water they drink. Some cows like to drink it as pure as possible, holding their mouths up to a waterfall or pipe, while others will deliberately choose to sip round the ‘green mantle of the standing pool’, as Poor Tom does in King Lear. Sometimes they will wait as much as twelve hours without drinking
at all, until they have the opportunity to reach their preferred source.
We are lucky here to have one stream with a very high calcium level; so high that any twigs or acorns that fall in eventually become coated so thickly that they turn into unrecognisable, bone-like objects. There are dew-ponds, pools and a lake and these and the streams give even the most discerning animal a fair choice.
For many years we made a point of offering all our visitors the chance to taste our milk and our water, with some surprising reactions. Quite a large number of people declared they had an allergy to milk but after a short description of how the milk was produced almost all wished to sample it and of those who did not, several asked to take some home to try. We built up a network of friends who could drink our milk but were allergic to any they bought. It seems, from all the observations we have made, that it is likely that allergies are caused not by certain foods but by the way those foods are produced and what treatment the plants and animals from which they derive have received.
There is no getting away from it, appropriate food is the beginning and ending of health. Thomas Sydenham said, ‘I had rather undertake the practice of physick with pure air, pure water and good food alone than with all the drugs in the Pharmacopoeia.’ Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, first published in 1861, states, ‘By a little care in dieting [the housekeeper] may prevent much outlay in nursing and much money in doctors’ bills.’ More recently Cindy Engel wrote in Wild Health that ‘human health is directly reliant on the health of the food we eat … we risk paying for cheap food with our health’.
But somewhere along the way we’ve lost or ignored this knowledge. Feeding animals is, or should be, instinctively easy: baby blackbirds need worms; lions need meat; sheep and cows need grass. Yet intolerable pressure to cut costs means farmers often trawl international markets for the cheapest and frequently the least appropriate foodstuffs for their animals. If you were to put inappropriate fuel in a car it would perform badly or stop. It seems that the effect of feeding people or animals the wrong food takes longer to discern but the consequences are equally dire and permanent.
More than two-thirds of the farmland in the UK is grassland. Most of this is unsuitable for crop production: keeping cattle and sheep on grassland is the only way to get food from it. We cannot eat grass but they are purpose-built to do just that. At the moment vast areas of arable land are used to grow crops to feed to animals – the least sustainable option. Grassland stores carbon, whereas ploughing releases it into the atmosphere.
Cattle and sheep receive a lot of criticism due to their methane emissions. I am no expert on this, but the one thing I notice that no one ever seems to mention is that when grassland is converted to cropland, the hedgerows get progressively smaller or disappear, often leading to the loss of the large hedgerow trees as well. The role of trees and hedgerows in nature conservation is well known but they are also vital for carbon storage, which at least partly offsets the methane emissions.*
* Environment Protection Agency, Climate Change Research Programme (CCRP) 2007–2013 Report Series No. 32.
Consumers who actively choose to eat organic high-welfare meat from 100 per cent grass-fed systems, more accurately described as pasture-fed, can thus influence for the better the way in which animals are reared, helping to bring about improvements to their own health as well as to the lives of animals. Such meat is often more expensive but if all the true costs were factored in, it would be less not more expensive and our pastoral landscape would be protected.
My brother Richard works for the Sustainable Food Trust, which is campaigning to increase awareness of the many hidden costs we pay, without realising it, for the way food is produced. More sustainable food production and more stringent animal-welfare systems will become mainstream only once these costs are understood and recognised by society and by governments.
Dorothy and her daughter, Little Dorothy
As a general rule a female bovine would not give birth for the first time before she was twenty-four months old. When Little Dorothy had her first calf she was only fifteen months and still suckling from her own mother.
Long before we realised that she was in calf, Little Dorothy had decided that she needed extra food. We would find her in all sorts of unusual places eating hay. She was small and neat and one night she spent in great comfort and solitude underneath a trailer that had hay both on top of and underneath it. The trailer was parked on the roadway that runs through the farm and all the other animals were confined to the fields and barns.
Although we were pleased that she had obviously enjoyed herself enormously, it was very difficult to understand how Little Dorothy had found her way there, and we all accused each other of negligence in having left a gate open. We made sure she was given plenty of time to herself during the day, eating hay ad-lib, and the following night we made doubly sure that the gates were fastened before going to bed. In the morning we found Little Dorothy curled up under the trailer again.
It was more than a fortnight later that I actually saw her escape.
The main gate, which opened onto the road from the field where the Dorothy family lived, was secured by a rope loop that hooked over the shutting post. It seemed like a good fastening, and allowed the gate to be left securely opened or securely closed depending on the situation.
Either Little Dorothy had watched how we fastened it or she had worked it out for herself. By using her nose and patiently wriggling the rope to the top of the post she managed to remove the loop and push the gate open. It always swung to again behind her, which was why no other animals had followed and why everything looked in order each morning.
This was much too good a game to give up and, as we later discovered, she could push her way back in again to see her mother and then go back once more to the trailer.
In May 2002 Little Dorothy gave birth to a tiny black heifer calf. We had been on tenterhooks for days, fearing that she might be too small to manage and wondering whether it might be necessary to perform a caesarean section. In the event everything went well and she required only minimal help.
The next few weeks were an eye-opener for us all.
Old Dorothy had been present during the birth just as Little Dorothy had witnessed her mother giving birth to Luke a few days before that. Old Dorothy was giving her tangible, visible advice and was the most superb grandmother imaginable.
After the initial three or four days Little Dorothy did not have sufficient milk to satisfy her rapidly growing daughter’s appetite so we supplemented the diet with bottles of extra milk, taken from another cow with plenty.
There was grass in the fields and both Dorothys ate like caterpillars all day, but it was necessary to bring the new arrival home in order to feed her with milk that had been warmed and put in bottles. The tiny calf understood the routine immediately but her mother (still a teenager by human standards) found it incredibly boring to walk all the way home when what she wanted to do was eat grass out in the fields with her friends.
To begin with Little Dorothy absolutely refused to come in without her mother, so Old Dorothy and Luke came too. We had not considered the possibility of walking the ‘baby’ home without her mother but it soon became apparent that Very Little Dorothy (as yet unnamed officially) was perfectly happy to walk home with her grandmother. Little Dorothy, therefore, maintained her former lifestyle and although she loved her calf she quite often forgot all about her, leaving her with grandma for increasingly long periods.
Before Very Little Dorothy was three weeks old she had shown herself to be wise beyond her age. She knew why she came home and was perfectly happy to come alone, like a tiny tot being sent shopping with a purse and a list to hand over at the counter of the corner shop. Very Little Dorothy became a fixture in the cow pen at night, preferring to sleep with the older house cows, eat hay at the rack like a grown-up and wander out in the morning to find her mother for her breakfast.
Gradually, Little Dorothy began to take more re
sponsibility for her daughter and as her milk-producing ability improved they spent more and more time together until the bottles of milk were politely but firmly refused.
In the following winter, December 2002, with the whole herd being fed hay every day, the duo thrived in their own special pen. We created an area with an especially low entrance, cordoned off with something a little like a limbo bar, and only the Dorothys understood how to get in and out again. It became their own secret spot where they spent whatever time they needed, in uncompetitive, blissful isolation, rejoining the others at will.
Twenty things you ought to know about cows
Cows love each other … at least some do.
Cows babysit for each other.
Cows nurse grudges.
Cows invent games.
Cows take umbrage.
Cows can communicate with people.
Cows can solve problems.
Cows make friends for life.
Cows have food preferences.
Cows can be unpredictable.
Cows can be good company.
Cows can be boring.
Cows can be intelligent.
Cows love music.
Cows can be gentle.
Cows can be aggressive.
Cows can be dependable.
The Secret Life of Cows Page 9