Till the Cows Come Home

by Philip Walling

  Recent work (2013) by Arne Ludwig at the Leibniz Institute in Berlin and Lawrence Alderson, a founder member of the Rare Breeds Survival Trust (and others), has traced the matrilineal descent of a White Park cow in Alderson’s Dynevor herd to a cow that lived in Britain 10,000 years ago. This tends to tell us that we should take a long view, not only of the length of time we have been keeping cattle in Britain, but also of the period over which they have been domesticated. In a word, nobody really knows. Results depend on whether researchers follow a haplogroup (a group of genes inherited from a single parent) through Y chromosomes (father to son) or through mitochondrial DNA (from mother to child of both sexes).

  If we assume there was no domestication of aurochs in Europe, then the bulls painted 17,500 years ago on the walls of the caves at Lascaux must have been wild beasts that our ancestors hunted, and not the forebears of domestic cattle. And the paintings were probably done for the same reason as hunters today have themselves photographed with the heads of the game they have shot and mounted on their walls. Perhaps if our Neolithic ancestors had known the art of taxidermy, and their specimens had survived, we would have had a better record of what they hunted. Instead we must be content with those cave paintings that have only survived because of a happy accident of topography and climate.

  There is another, older explanation for the origin of our cattle, which is rather outmoded now but which, by what might be more than a coincidence, leads us just up the road from the Zagros Mountains, to Mount Ararat, where Noah’s Ark came to rest after the Flood. Only a few years before Darwin published The Origin of Species, William Youatt, in the introduction to his great work Cattle (1834), traced the ‘native country of the ox, reckoning from the time of the flood … to the plains of Ararat, and he was a domesticated animal when he issued from the ark. He was found wherever the sons of Noah migrated, for he was necessary for the existence of man; and even to the present day, wherever man has trodden, he is found in a domesticated or wild state.’

  Genesis tells us that our domestic cattle had been our necessary and constant companions since the creation of the world. Even before the Flood, Jabal, the son of Lamech (probably born during the lifetime of Adam), was ‘the father of such as dwell in tents, and of such as have cattle’. After the Flood, there are numerous biblical references to cattle forming part of the wealth of individuals. When Abraham went into Egypt to escape famine, Pharaoh gave him sheep and oxen and he became ‘very rich in cattle’. Both he and Lot, his nephew, owned so many cattle that they had ‘herdmen’ to look after them. These were almost certainly domestic cattle, because they are being looked after in herds.

  The Bible is not the only source for these kinds of references. In Hindu scripture, the domestic cow was the first living thing created by the supreme deity after mankind, and as a result people are forbidden to harm it or shed its blood. Cows were not domesticated from wild species, but given by God as our servants, a separate order of creation from wild creatures. Out of gratitude for God’s gift they were to be treated with reverence; for example, neither Hindus nor Jews were allowed to muzzle an ox when it was threshing corn. Even the bloodthirsty Romans punished by exile anyone wantonly killing an ox, although that was more to do with its usefulness than out of any humanitarian concern for its welfare.

  It is suggested that we should not be too quick to reject the biblical narrative, because when its modern rival is examined critically, it makes hardly any more sense and begs as many questions as it answers. Domestication is a hard thing to achieve. It is not the same as ‘taming’. Any wild animal can be taken when young enough and brought up away from its parents until it reaches adulthood. As a juvenile it will respond to its keepers in a broadly similar way to how it would respond to its natural parents. But once it is mature, its true nature will emerge and it will tend to behave according to its genetic inheritance, unless in some way its nature has been modified so that it is capable of being enfolded into human society, and that modification has become fixed and heritable.

  Any scientific hypothesis that depends on our ancestors domesticating a few wild cows is also hard to accept on a practical, common-sense level. Have any of these scientists ever handled a difficult bull, like a wild Dexter, or encountered a Spanish fighting bull at close quarters? Yet these are both domesticated. At some point one wild beast of the kind that Caesar describes, violently hostile to mankind, must actually have been used to start the process. It can’t have been done over a short period of time, like training a dog, because it involves transforming its nature, or that of its offspring, from ferocious to docile. You can hand-rear an alligator from an egg and let it swim in your bath, but you will never turn it into a trustworthy domestic pet. And if that’s too extreme an example, consider the dingo. In certain states in Australia it is still illegal to keep one or to cross it with a domestic dog, because there is something in its nature that no amount of human handling can reliably domesticate.

  Also it is by no means clear which came first. Did the domesticated ox give the first farmers the wherewithal to settle to farming; or, having determined to give up hunter-gathering, did they then domesticate the ox for the multiple purposes for which they needed it? And if they domesticated it first, why did they do it? If they had never seen such an animal before, how can they have known what they were looking for, or that it might have been possible to create an animal (from the ferocious type Caesar described) that would be docile enough to train to the cart and plough? And if they settled down to farming first, how did they till the soil and cart its produce before they had domesticated an ox? It is easy to imagine that at some point one or more aurochs bulls might have bred with already domesticated cows – it can’t have been the other way round, because the calves would have been reared with the wild herd and lost to domestication. But that does not answer the question of where they found the domestic cows in the first place.

  I had enough trouble getting some newly calved Friesian heifers to stand still long enough not to kick off the teat cups when I first tried to milk them. With one in particular, I had to loop a piece of rope around her belly in a slip knot just in front of the udder and over her back, and pull it as tight as I could in front of the hip bone, so that she was nipped up in two segments, like a caterpillar. This stopped her from kicking out sideways. I also used an aluminium device with a crook at each end. One end went into the groin and the other pressed on the nerve near the hip bone. This was not as effective as the rope, but it was quicker to put on.

  And this was an animal with 12,000 years of domestication behind it. I doubt our Neolithic forebears could have got within half a mile of an aurochs, let alone restrained one with a rope. Did they even have ropes in Neolithic times?

  Derek Gow has experience of trying to work with the modern version of the aurochs. In 2009, he brought 13 Heck cattle from Belgium to his farm in Devon. These were descended from cattle bred in Germany at the beginning of the Weimar Republic in the 1920s and 30s by the brothers Heinz and Lutz Heck. Hermann Goering and the Nazis were ardent environmentalists, and supported the Heck brothers’ efforts to recreate the long-extinct aurochs by back-crossing breeds they thought might be their nearest living descendants. Lutz Heck was director of the Berlin zoological gardens and Heinz of the Munich equivalent. It took them 11 years to achieve what they believed to be success, each of them using different breeds. Lutz included Spanish fighting bulls in his melange, while Heinz preferred other varieties, one of which was wild Corsican cattle. None of Lutz’s cattle in the Berlin zoological gardens survived the Soviet occupation after 1945, but some of Heinz’s fierce throwbacks lived on as the ancestors of the modern Heck cattle.

  Their breeding has been criticized as no more than fancy because they are just domestic cattle with a bit of wildness bred into them. They have also been denigrated as ‘Nazi cattle’, and it has been said that they do not resemble the aurochs – although their detractors can have little idea of what the true aurochs looked like. It is argued th
at the ancient aurochs would have been much bigger, fiercer, more muscular and with longer legs, and the modern version has no more of these characteristics than do, for example, the Spanish fighting cattle.

  Gow’s 13 Heck cattle grew into a herd of over 20, which, like that other product of scientific experimentation, Frankenstein’s monster, ran out of control. By January 2015, he had to shoot all but six of his herd because they were simply too dangerous to handle. It is worth remembering that all the ancestors of these cattle had been through a process of domestication. None of them was a wild beast when the Heck brothers used them in their experiments to try to reverse domestication. Although they made them wild enough to be dangerous, it proved impossible to take domestic animals and breed the wild back into them. How much harder would it have been, without all the modern facilities, to take even one wild beast and domesticate it.

  Until genetic evidence can be found to show that our domestic cattle have some aurochs DNA, it seems the best that can be said is that we have had domestic cattle for at least 10,000 years, not descended, but as a separate species from the wild variety. And that takes us back to the beginning of the Neolithic period, when we are told that people made the transition from hunter-gathering to settled farming. But as further evidence comes to light, and we find we are having to extend back into ‘pre-history’, the beginning of human agricultural settlement, it must follow that our domestic cattle, being at least as old as farming, have been with us for a very long time indeed. Where they came from I do not know, but as things stand, neither does anybody else. It pleases me to believe that we have had them as long as we have been human, as our constant companions and partners in the great endeavour of taming the wilderness.

  For sheer dogged power, the ox could not be beaten. Pound for pound it was stronger, had more stamina, was cheaper to keep because it was a better converter than the horse of poor-quality roughage into energy, and was less demanding to look after. And it could be eaten when its time was up, without any of the revulsion and guilt that our society associates with consuming horseflesh. As oxen gradually gave way around 200 years ago to horses, partly for reasons of speed, cattle lost their ancient triple function and their breeding resolved itself into two distinct purposes. Just as sheep breeders had to decide between wool and meat, because it is impossible to improve the carcase of a sheep without the wool deteriorating, so the impossibility of improving the milk yield of a cow without its meat suffering caused cattle to become either dairy or beef producers. During this transition into specialization, many breeds retained their function of dual-purpose producers of milk and meat, but as the nineteenth century progressed, different breeds took separate paths. And in the last half-century, these differences have become ever more pronounced.

  This book is an attempt to give a flavour of the very long road that our faithful cattle have trodden with us. For throughout history, whenever and wherever in the world we have needed their strength, their manure, their milk, their meat, and all that we get from their carcases when they are dead, our ever-dependable, uncomplaining oxen have been at our side, enriching our lives.

  1 R. Bollongino et al., ‘Modern Taurine Cattle Descended from Small Number of Near-Eastern Founders’, Oxford Journal of Molecular Biology and Evolution (September 2012).

  CHAPTER 1

  Dairying

  Believing agriculture to be well calculated to improve the virtue, and call forth the talents of men, I have taken every opportunity of showing its superiority to all other pursuits.

  William Aiton (1731–93)

  MILKING COWS IS a special form of slavery. The responsibility is relentless. Dairy cows, like all animals, are creatures of habit and they give of their best if they have a routine. They have to be milked at the same time, twice (sometimes three times) a day. Every morning the first thing you do is get up and milk the cows. It doesn’t matter what else is happening that morning; the cows have to be milked before breakfast. And whatever you are doing, wherever you are, you have to be back home by five o’clock for the milking, and unless you have help, you can’t take a single day off.

  I had 60 milking cows, which took an hour to milk if I got a move on. I milked them in a byre converted into a milking parlour. Even back in the early 1980s, when milk fetched quite a good price, there wasn’t enough profit in it to employ anybody to help me. Every morning of the year, Christmas Day included, at half past eight, give or take five minutes, the milk tanker came to pick up the milk from that morning’s and the previous evening’s milking. It had to be cooled, otherwise the driver could refuse to take it. To get it down to the right temperature took about three quarters of an hour, so the milking had to be done by around 7.45, which meant that I had to start about 6.30.

  On a summer morning, with the early sun creeping down the fellside and warming the still air, it was pure joy to plunge outside into the new day. But pulling on my overalls, stiff with cow muck, and dragging myself out of the house at six o’clock on a pitch-dark January morning, with freezing rain lashing the bedroom window, was less of a pleasure. Rolling over was out of the question; I simply could not fail to milk those cows. Illness had to be ignored because there was nobody else who could do the milking. There was no point in even allowing myself to admit to having flu, or a thumping hangover, or, on one occasion, food poisoning, because it just made the task even harder. Only once, when I was too ill to do it after I had suffered a welding flash, did my wife ask my neighbour from down the valley to milk the cows.

  Once I got started, the milking had a way of creating its own momentum and I would lose myself in the mechanical repetition. I became focused on getting through it as fast as I could and tended to ignore everything but the diurnal work of keeping a dairy herd, with record-keeping and planning ahead falling by the wayside. I was particularly bad at recording when each cow had calved and when she had been served by the bull or artificial insemination (AI). And if I didn’t know how long a cow had been milking, I didn’t know when she ought to be dried off to give her a rest to prepare for her next calving and lactation.

  Some farmers are suited to the routine and certainty of milking cows. They accept it as something that has to be done before the work of the day begins. And at one time it paid the bills, put a bottom in a farming business and was the financial salvation of many small farmers. But paradoxically, for many others, especially if they were one-man bands, it proved to be their nemesis. Milking became the focus of their day’s activity; once it had been done, they felt they could take it easy until the afternoon because they had made their money for the day. From being only one part of a well-run farm, the dairy herd began to consume most of their effort and attention.

  For about ten years, maybe longer, after I gave up milking, I suffered a series of nightmares about the whole process. In fact I still have them now and again, but not as intensely as I once did. In one, I have forgotten to milk the cows for a long time – many days, maybe a week or more – and they are locked in their shed, where they haven’t been fed. Some have split and burst udders; others are lying in a khaki mixture of milk and their own liquid excrement, bloated and unable to get to their feet. Some are standing in agony with grotesquely swollen udders, milk streaming from their teats. Some are dead; one looks as if she died trying to give birth, a pair of hooves and a hideous head with grotesquely swollen and blackened tongue flopping from her vagina; pink froth like ectoplasm is congealed around its nostrils and cold dead muzzle. I am revolted by my criminal negligence and I do not know how to put it right.

  In another dream I am milking eight cows side by side in the byre. I have attached the pulsing rubber cups, one to each of their four teats, and I can see the milk through the little glass inserts, coursing down the tubes up into the receiving jars. The dogs start barking and I go outside into the yard to investigate. A delivery van has arrived with a parcel to sign for. I take the parcel, sign the sheet and have a chat with the driver. When I get back to the cows, I find that time has played a trick o
n me and I have been away for more than an hour. During that time, the milking machines have milked the cows dry. Three of them are being sucked down into the teat cups; half of one cow has disappeared and the udders and bellies of the other two have gone. I rush to pull off the cups, but they have such a strong hold that I cannot remove them. As I am struggling with the first three, another cow is being sucked through the teat cups and down the milk line. The suction is too strong and the other cows are being hoovered up bit by bit to the rhythmic ker-plop … ker-plop … ker-plop of the milking machine, and there is nothing I can do to stop it.

  I wake up in a desperate state. How could I have allowed this to happen? I am weighed down by terrible guilt that my neglect has caused such suffering to animals in my care, and I only gradually realize that it was a dream. Just as hearing the voice of his master after a slave has gained his freedom penetrates his soul and takes him back into a horror he can never leave behind, for many years hearing the sound of a milking machine took me straight back to the misery of that milking parlour all those years ago.

  I’m not alone. Milking cows has driven many men mad.

  One less than energetic local farmer, who didn’t enjoy early mornings or repairing his fences, or the work of mucking out his little herd of cattle, let them wander at will all winter over the whole farm. On dark mornings, when they were hungry, the herd would make their way into the farmyard and mill about, mooing, waiting to be fed. He solved this hindrance to his slumbers by carrying bales of hay upstairs and stacking them in his bedroom beside the window. When the cattle turned up for breakfast, he would throw up the sash window, cut the string on the bales and toss out the sections of the hay bales, frisbee-like, to the hungry herd before going back to bed.