When the bacteria in the rumen have broken down the fibre into digestible amino acids, vitamins and minerals, the resulting substance passes into the next of the cow’s stomachs, the reticulum. This acts in conjunction with the rumen, with the added function of trapping foreign objects, particularly stones, metal and bits of wire the animal might have swallowed, preventing them from moving further down the digestive tract and puncturing the wall of the intestine. Sometimes, if there is a greater than normal risk of ingesting ferrous objects, cattle can be made to swallow a specially shaped magnet, which will lodge in the reticulum and attract metal objects to it.
The food particles then pass to the third compartment in the digestive tract, the omasum. This filters out any large pieces and returns them to the rumen and reticulum for further processing; it acts as the gatekeeper to the ‘true stomach’, the abomasum, where hydrochloric acid digests the food and dead bacteria that have travelled down from the rumen, in a similar way to the human stomach. Beyond this are the two intestines, which treat the waste before it is expelled as cow muck, one of the most valuable fertilizers in the world.
We looked at some more bulls, all of which John said would do the job. All the while, more men hailed him and told him how delighted they were to see him. After that, we went into the auctioneer’s office and introduced ourselves. And then the sale began.
The first bull was led into the ring on a spotless white rope halter by a man in a white coat. He encouraged it to walk with its nose in the air by pulling upwards on a thin rope attached to its ring. It kicked its front legs out when it walked, a trait that John found unappealing. Nonetheless, it made 800 guineas. John pronounced the next bull to be ‘too ginger’. I didn’t dare ask what was wrong with ginger, although I agreed that the colour of its coat did not attract me.
And so it went on, bull after bull paraded through the ring, until I became so bamboozled by Hereford bulls that I could barely distinguish one from another. I found some more attractive than others, but often when I expressed admiration for one, John would find some fault with it and I didn’t dare bid. One or two we agreed on fetched a lot more money than I had to spend. Sometimes I would make a bid or two and then stop short of a winning bid because I was terrified of paying too much. The main problem was that I didn’t know what I was looking for and so I didn’t have the confidence to go all the way. Once or twice I pulled out of the bidding and missed a bull that John said afterwards I should have bought. But he hadn’t said that while I was bidding, because he didn’t want to influence me and get the blame for me buying a bull I later wouldn’t like. The truth was that I would have liked him to buy me a bull, but I didn’t want to ask him, and he credited me with being more decisive than I was. Also, I couldn’t spot potential because I had no experience of watching an animal grow and develop. And as I could have taken just about any one of them home and been satisfied with it as soon as I had forgotten the others, I found it as hard to choose as I do from a restaurant menu when I can eat anything on it.
It was getting towards the end of the sale when John bought a bull for 970 guineas. He hadn’t mentioned the animal before and I didn’t remember inspecting him before the sale started. I rather liked him. He planted his hooves flat on the ground and stood well, and he looked up boldly at the crowd tiered around the ring. I still hadn’t made a purchase when the bull whose testicles and teeth we had inspected came into the ring led by his white-coated owner. He plodded round and round, eyes bulging a little too much for my liking, but John said, ‘Here’s your bull’ as the bidding started at the low figure of 200 guineas. It stuck there for what seemed like ages, until I held up the folded catalogue and nodded to the auctioneer, who immediately added 50 guineas to the price. I had only wanted to bid another 25, but I was too timid to correct him and I let it go. Later in my farming life I would have shouted, ‘Twenty-five!’ but I didn’t dare draw attention to myself and I didn’t say anything to John.
My bid seemed to break the impasse, because the bidding quickly went up without me, in 50-guinea jumps, to 650 guineas, where there was another hiatus, during which the auctioneer looked across at me expectantly.
‘Give him another,’ whispered John out of the side of his mouth.
Looking directly at the auctioneer, I barely had to move my head for him to get the message, and the bidding set off again, 50 guineas at a time. It stuck when I bid 950 guineas. I was feeling deeply uneasy about being carried along this high – and was wondering whether my bank manager would honour the cheque – when the auctioneer swept his arm around the tiers of benches, pointing with a little stick with a knob on the end at his other bidders and repeating, ‘Nine hundred and fifty guineas … I have nine hundred and fifty guineas bid for this exceptional bull. A bull that any self-respecting breeder would consider an honour to take home! Come on, gentlemen! Do I hear a thousand guineas for this fine bull?’
He glanced down at the seller, who was doggedly parading his unconcerned bull round the ring on a short halter, tweaking the cord through his nose to keep his head up and leaning in to his beast’s neck as he plodded round. He betrayed no emotion. He was neither accepting nor rejecting my bid. The auctioneer was on his own.
He proceeded to recite his genealogy. ‘He’s out of a Princess cow by a Greengarth bull, gentlemen. There’s fifty generations of breeding here and many of them I’ve sold myself through this very ring. Nine hundred and fifty guineas? Is that all he has to be? Nine hundred and fifty … he’s going, gentlemen … I’m going to sell him …’
I was sure I had bought my first ever bull. How the hell was I going to pay for him? I wished I hadn’t bid so much. He was a nice bull, but was he that nice? I didn’t really know.
‘It’s your last chance, gentlemen.’
He then pointed his stick at the under-bidder and said quietly, so as not to disturb the drama he had created and relished, ‘I’ll take twenty-five, if that will help …’
I heard the man mutter, ‘Go on then.’
‘Thank you, sir!’ declared the auctioneer triumphantly. ‘Nine hundred and seventy-five guineas!’
Then he looked down at me.
My first emotion was relief that I was off the hook. I no longer had to shell out the best part of a thousand pounds I hadn’t got. And I did not want to bid any more. Then I heard, through my confusion, John whispering, ‘Make him a thousand! One more. He’s a bloody good bull.’
‘No. I don’t want him that badly,’ I whispered back.
I didn’t say what I should have done – that I couldn’t afford him. I just shook my head at the auctioneer and moved my outstretched hand, palm down, away from my body to indicate that I was done. But the auctioneer wouldn’t accept it.
‘Come on, sir. Round him up. A thousand guineas. You’ve stuck to him doggedly. You can’t let him go now when another twenty-five will secure him. He’s meant to be going home with you. He’s your bull!’
The eyes of a hundred gnarled farmers were on me, willing the contest to continue. It was all right for them, it wasn’t their money, and anyway they probably had a lot more of it than I did. But he was a good bull. And during the last few intense minutes I had even grown to feel he was my bull. I didn’t want him to leave the ring belonging to the last bidder, a fellow I had begun to resent. And I did need a bull. In fact I needed one this week, and I wouldn’t get another as good as this until next year’s Hereford sale. And John was urging me to buy him …
‘Nine … hundred … and … seventy-five … guineas,’ intoned the shrewd old auctioneer, scanning the assembled farmers for the slightest sign of another bid and sweeping his arm around the tiers of benches that raked up to the ceiling at the back of the round mart.
‘Going once … going twice … going …’
John’s hand, grasping a folded catalogue, shot up and he said in a firm, steady voice, ‘One thousand!’
‘Thank you, sir! We have a fresh bidder. One thousand guineas.’
He knew that was the fin
al price, because after the under-bidder shook his head grimly, he gave the mart one last quick scan and smacked the knobbly head of his stick onto the wooden lectern.
‘One thousand guineas! He’s going to Cumberland, gentlemen. One thousand guineas to John Scott from Cockermouth.’
The bull was led out and the hubbub resumed as the next bull came into the ring.
John got to his feet and nudged me with his elbow. ‘Come on. Let’s go and have a look at your bull.’
We went down the wooden steps and pushed through the throng of farmers leaning against the metalwork on the side of the ring, following the bull down the aisle between the pens. He certainly had an impressive backside; two muscled thighs flexed and rippled as he plodded along. His owner tied the rope of his white halter to the side of the pen and offered him a bucket of water, which he sniffed and disdained. The man then congratulated John on his purchase, saying he was the best Hereford bull he’d bred for some years and that John had got a bargain.
‘Well, it’s this young lad here who bought him. I was just acting as his agent.’ And one of John’s characteristic half-smiles lifted the right side of his face into a grin.
‘Well, the luck will be for him then.’ We shook hands on the deal and some folded banknotes passed surreptitiously from his hand to mine. I thanked him and put them into my pocket without counting them.
‘He’s a good bull. He’ll give you some good calves. You can’t beat breeding.’
I went off to the auction office to write a cheque I was far from sure the bank would honour and to arrange transport for both bulls for the journey from Hereford to Cockermouth. The haulier who had brought my Irish heifers had a wagon there and the driver was tannoyed. He accepted a commission to carry the two bulls home. He had a couple of others to deliver on the way and was anxious to set off. I left it to him to get them in his wagon and found John in the bar having a celebratory whisky with the seller of the bull he had bought.
My bull was called Jason and turned out to be everything the seller had claimed. He arrived on the wagon the next day and I turned him out with his new harem. He trotted down the field, where the heifers mobbed him, licking and nuzzling and jumping about like adolescent girls with a pop star. He proved not to be indifferent to their charms, because to my astonishment he mounted and served one almost immediately. I hadn’t even noticed she was bulling. If I’d been relying on AI, I would have missed her and would have had to wait for three weeks before she came back into oestrus and could have been served again.
Jason was a gentle animal, easy to handle, with a lot of the steady character that the old ploughing oxen must have had. He accepted without demur being tied up in the byre for the winter. But he had one defect that was to seal his fate in the end, though it took some months for it to come out. In fact, it was not until late the following summer when he was out with the cows that it became apparent.
He was tremendously sensitive to the scent of a cow in season. He could detect it on the wind if it was in the right direction. You could see whenever he had the scent because it triggered the flehmen response, which is a sort of grimace that displays itself as an involuntary curling-back of the top lip to expose the teeth. Its purpose, in most cases, is to close the nasal passages so that the pheromones given off by a cow in season can enter the vomeronasal organ, or Jacobson’s organ, an alternative sensory organ, wrapped in cartilage, that lies between the roof of the mouth and the palate. Bulls are only one of many animals to have this organ: it exists in animals as diverse as domestic cats, horses, hedgehogs, rhinoceroses and elephants. Its primary purpose is to detect two types of pheromones and hormones: those that act as sexual stimuli and those given off by animals in fear. The smell of blood triggers the discharge of the fear pheromone in cattle and is what causes them to panic at the slightest scent of it. The sexual pheromones mostly come from the urine of the female when she is receptive to the male for breeding purposes. A bull can detect impending oestrus two or three days before a cow ovulates, by tasting her urine.
The first thing my bull did in the morning when I let him out to graze was lift his nose into the wind, curl back his lip and take a long sniff of the air to see if there was anything that would need his services that day. According to our neighbour’s wife, she had sometimes caught sight of her less-than-faithful husband doing the same thing as he left the house on a business trip.
Using his pheromone detector, a bull can smell a female on heat up to five miles away, and my bull was no exception. For a few months after he arrived, if nothing was doing in his own field of cows, he could be seen restlessly pacing up and down along the fence making low mooing noises. My neighbour’s Friesian dairy heifers proved to be particularly alluring, and their proximity, even a few fields away, drove him to distraction. But he could do no harm because the couple of strands of barbed wire along the top of my fences kept him in. This changed one summer morning, when it all became too much for him.
‘Hello?’
‘Philip? That Hereford bull of yours is in with my heifers and he’s bulled at least three! You’d better come and get him.’ He put the phone down abruptly.
When I got there, he had paired up with a particularly flirtatious little heifer and they had separated themselves from the herd. They were standing together, his chin resting on her rump, and her flanks spittle-flecked; the hair at the top of her tail had been scuffed up and they were both agitated. It was quite clear what they had been doing and this little display was their post-coital rest.
There was no point in trying to separate him from these heifers while he was in this state – and anyway I knew I couldn’t do it on my own – so I left him alone with his conquest and determined to go back later when it would be easier to prise him away from his paramour.
My neighbour phoned again after lunch.
‘My heifers and that bull of yours are on their way to Lorton. They’ll be in the village if we don’t catch them.’
‘Right! I’m leaving now.’
The little herd was grazing the wide roadside verge and nearing the village when we caught up, overtook and turned them for home. My neighbour drove in his old van and I walked alongside with my dog hanging back to head off any that might make a break for freedom. Out of the van window he said, ‘He’s bulled three. I didn’t want Hereford-cross calves. These heifers are too good for that. I wanted to put a Friesian on them. They’ll have to be injected and I think you should pay the vet’s bill.’
‘Er, hang on. He’s a bloody good bull. I paid a lot for him. Calves by him would be worth something surely? It’s not a complete dead loss. What if I pay half?’
He muttered something about my being a cheeky sod, but didn’t answer me directly before I had to run back to stop one of his heifers breaking back.
When we got to his field, the heifers turned in through the open gate and we managed to separate my wayward bull from them and chase him off up the road on his own towards my farm, followed by my dog. But when my neighbour tried to close the gate on his heifers, it became clear how they had got out: the metal gate had been bent into a U shape and would not reach across the gap, and the chain holding it had been pulled out of its catch on the post.
‘Your bloody bull has bent the gate.’
I couldn’t deny it. Jason had pushed at the middle of it until it gave way under his immense weight.
‘He doesn’t know his own strength.’
But he did.
That was the beginning of his many romantic forays. Whichever field I put him in, he either deformed the gate if it was metal, or if it was wooden, he would push until it splintered in half. After two years, I had to sell him. I was sorry to see him go, because his calves were as good as his breeder had said. And he was as quiet as a lamb, despite his immense strength. But he had served his purpose. My heifers never had any trouble calving his calves.
The Hereford is part of the great tribe of red cattle that populated the southern counties of England in a sweeping crescen
t from Norfolk to Sussex, Devon to Herefordshire. It is thought that they all looked similar until a Dutch cross – introduced, it is believed, by the first Viscount Scudamore (1601–71), of Holme Lacy in Herefordshire – added bulk to the body and white finching on the belly, switch of the tail and rump, and in particular the face. Neither the coat colour nor the finching was fixed. The body colour ranged from red to yellow, white to grey or even silver, and the finching was ‘fickle, freckled who knows how’. It took a hundred years of breeding for the ‘bald’ white face to become the distinctive badge of the breed’s identity, which colour-marks all its progeny, and for the coat to become dark red to red-yellow.
The outstanding qualities of the Hereford were its thriftiness, docility, and good beefing qualities when they were sent into the Midland counties to be fattened after four or five years working the plough. The beefing qualities and strength of constitution ensured demand from the graziers of the world. The cows are long-lived, highly fertile, ready breeders and have a slightly shorter gestation period than other breeds. The bulls are renowned for their potency and determination to breed (a quality my neighbour did not seem to appreciate as much as I did). When coupled with the Hereford’s outstanding capacity to lay down high-quality flesh on its ample frame, even when pastured on scanty fare, it is hardly surprising there are five million registered worldwide, from the arctic snows of Finland, to the dust and heat of South Africa, the hard grazing of South America and the droughts of the Australian Outback.
The remarkable thing about the breed is that its refinement into its modern form started in the 1740s, two decades before Bakewell began his work. Beginning with Benjamin Tomkins in 1742, a line of worthy West Midland and Welsh March families fixed the breed’s valuable characteristics by selecting animals with the very qualities that by the 1780s caused it to spread out from its native county. It was the first English breed to be recognized as a true breed and it produced the finest English draught oxen ever bred. But as ever, consonant with the ancient truth of breeding, the Hereford’s milking ability was necessarily sacrificed to the quality of its carcase.
Till the Cows Come Home Page 17