CHAPTER 13
The Irish Breeds
Is trua gan ciar dhubh agam
Is trua gan ciar dhubh agam
Is trua gan ciar dhubh agam
Is Maire óna hathair!
I wish I had a Kerry cow,
A Kerry cow, a Kerry cow,
I wish I had a Kerry cow,
And Mary from her father!
Traditional Irish rhyme1
THERE ARE TWO remarkable breeds long native to Ireland. They are originally from the same Celtic stock (with admissions of Channel Island and Devon stock along the way), but at some time in the past they separated and the Kerry became a dairy animal. It is one of the first European cattle breeds to be bred solely for milk production and is the ideal crofter’s cow: small (no more than 38 inches at the shoulder), thrifty, resilient and, for its size, one of the heaviest producers of high-quality milk of any breed. It will manage on almost any type of pasture and, if necessary, live outside all winter, growing a thick black coat that will repel rain and insulate it from bad weather better than any other dairy beast. Its light frame and comparatively large hooves allow it to graze the kind of sodden land common in Ireland, without doing too much damage. Three Kerrys can be kept to two larger cattle.
In the last few decades, the breed has lost out to the bigger commercial dairy cows, first Shorthorns and then Friesians and Holsteins, and is now a rare breed, kept alive in Ireland and North America by a few enthusiasts. The Irish government supports it by paying a grant of €86 to owners of five breeding cows or more for each pure-bred calf registered in the Kerry Cattle Handbook, and by keeping a herd at Farmleigh, the state’s official guest house, which it bought from the Guinness family in 1999. A herd grazes the Killarney National Park demesne grasslands, and Murphy’s ice-cream makers in Dingle, County Kerry, started using Kerry milk in 2006 to support the indigenous breed.
The breed is completely black (with a red strain that is not popular). The occasional cow has a little white on her udder. They naturally bear lyre-shaped white horns with distinctive black tips, reminiscent of an Irish harp, although most are de-horned now for safer handling. Bulls weigh up to 1000 lb (450 kg) and cows 900 lb (400 kg). Unlike the Dexter, they are renowned for their placid temperament; unusually for a dairy breed, even the bulls are considered docile. They are described as ‘agile and active’; in other words, they have minds of their own, can jump barriers and sometimes are hard to keep in the field. They are easy calvers, having wide-set pelvic bones, and are long-lived, producing calves and milk well into their teens. They regularly produce 1,000 gallons and more of high-quality milk in a lactation, with 4 per cent butterfat and about the same amount of protein – ideal for butter-making. The globules of fat are much smaller than in the milk of modern commercial breeds – in this they are similar to the Gloucester – and therefore the milk is easier to digest, making it a well-balanced food easily tolerated by ‘infants and invalids’. The Kerry’s milk as butter and cream made up a large part of the diet of Irish country people, who like country people everywhere seldom ate meat.
The Kerry has been supported by the Irish government from early times. From 1888 to 1902, premiums were paid to encourage good bulls to be made available for breeding. This was to counter the sale of the best bulls to England and the retention of inferior sires in remote country places in Ireland. There was even a Livestock Breeding Act passed in 1925, which designated a Kerry Cattle Area in which only Kerry bulls could be kept. The regulations were later relaxed, but show the concern of the government to support their native breed.
Kerrys were once the dominant breed in Ireland, but despite the measures of support, they have declined to fewer than 1,000 in their homeland, with small herds in the USA, Canada and on the UK mainland. Recognizing their rapid decline, in 1951 the Irish Minister of Agriculture in a speech to the Dáil said he was ‘irritated’ by ‘certain sophisticated farmers’ bringing in Jersey, Guernsey and Ayrshire cows with no respect for the native breed, which was overlooked because it was native. If it had been an ‘Andalusian cow people would be paying 200 guineas for it and would bring it in on a passenger liner. If we could make the Kerry cow as remunerative a business as the people of the Channel Islands have made of Jerseys and Guernseys we would have secured for the kingdom of Kerry a not insignificant source of income.’ But the ‘deplorable tendency of Irish people to look down their noses at their neighbour’s son or their neighbour’s beast is a perennial problem. If it’s ours it is no good … but if it is a Jersey or Guernsey everybody kneels down in front of it and says: “Is it not wonderful? Is it not lovely?”’ Why, he asked, did the Irish people ‘possess that supreme contempt for their neighbour’s son or beast, but that son and beast conquers the world when they get outside Ireland’?
The Dexter is the other little black Irish cow, but it is more dual purpose than its Kerry cousin. Originally a crofter’s house cow, a pronounced wild strain runs through the breed that makes some of them hard to handle. They’re instinctively at home with other domestic livestock and are, like dogs, easy to train to the voice. They can be playful and naughty and go from obediently coming in for milking to chasing off a dog or a rabbit at full speed. Every herd has a leader, and if the leader can be controlled the rest of the herd will follow suit.
My neighbour had a herd of Dexters that he kept largely for amusement, but he also sold the beef from surplus young stock. He had two cows that were so wild they were dangerous. It was not wise to go too far into the field without leaving an escape route. One late summer evening we went to inspect the herd, which was grazing in the lower part of the field. One of the cows spotted us and made a low mooing sound, which alerted the rest of the herd. They lifted their heads in unison and gradually started to move uphill towards us, quickening their pace as they came.
‘Come on! Make for the gate!’ my friend said.
The herd was gaining on us as we moved purposefully towards the field gate about a hundred yards away. We started running and clambered over the metal gate just before one of the cows got there and ran into it with her horns down, lifting her head but not managing to toss the gate off its hinges.
‘It’s you,’ said my friend. ‘She doesn’t like strangers.’
If the animals hadn’t been so dangerous, it would have been funny: a few diminutive black and red cows, about the size of Shetland ponies, chasing a couple of grown men out of a field. But had they caught us, there is no doubt that at least two of them would have attacked and tried to gore us. They certainly did not persuade me to change my mind about the wild little things. They weigh about 800 lb and stand three feet high at the shoulder. They will live on vegetation that most cattle would turn their noses up at and are perfect for tethering in an orchard or on a bank or piece of steep waste ground, to eat it down instead of having to mow it. They will eat young nettles, green fronds of bracken and even seaweed. Their milk is even higher in butterfat than the Kerry, at 4.5 to 5.5 per cent, with certain cows giving milk of over 6 per cent. Two gallons of Dexter milk will make a pound of butter, whereas it takes nearly three gallons from most other breeds.
The Dexter is really a miniature version of the Kerry, created, according to David Low writing in 1845, by a Mr Dexter, agent to Maude Lord Hawarden (pronounced Harden) ‘by selecting from the best of the mountain cattle of the district’. The cattle rapidly became more popular in England than in Ireland, and in 1886, at the Royal Show in Norwich, a three-year-old Dexter cow was shown in the ‘Any Other Breed’ class, while an English Dexter and Dexter/ Kerry herd book was published in 1892.
However you look at them, Dexters can now be no more than hobby cattle. Even the long-legged version (they come in short- and long-legged types) is a dwarf, and as endearing as they are, they are never going to be commercially viable. When W. R. Thrower was writing about Dexters after the last war, he envisaged their being kept as a kind of house cow to supplement the rationing-restricted diet of people with a decent-sized garden and maybe a pa
ddock or two or an orchard. How times have changed in 70 years! He gives the example of a woman who was living in a small house with a large shed adjacent, but no land other than a moderate-sized garden. She kept two Dexters in milk by grazing them in the lanes and neighbours’ orchards. Her annual sale of milk gave her a useful increase in income. Another example is a ‘professional man’, living with his wife and four children on the outskirts of a large village in an ordinary house with a fair-sized garden ‘vigorously cultivated’. His aim was to become self-supporting and provide his family with ‘food they were otherwise denied’, by having two Dexter cows graze an acre-and-a-half vacant building plot next door. Thrower does not say who is going to milk the cow, but it’s implied that it will be the wife’s duty.
He bemoans the acres of unused land visible even from a train journey from London to Manchester, and the wasted railway embankments and abandoned branch lines where a cow or two could be grazed ‘by anyone with enterprise’. The grass burnt every summer to keep the tracksides clear would make more than enough hay to feed the cattle during the winter. He goes even further and suggests that a few cows could be profitably tethered to graze on the wasted verges of main roads, and the grass being ‘scythed at council expense’ could be gathered up by people living nearby to use for winter feed for a Dexter house cow. Water could be carried to the cows in old milk churns on a trailer hitched to a car, and the cows could be milked where they were tethered on the roadside.
‘Quite a number of people live in a house with a paddock extending to three or four acres originally intended for the carriage horse of palmier days.’ These paddocks had become a liability, and what better way of keeping the grass and weeds down than to own a few Dexters. It was a crying shame to him that wasted land was not dedicated to grazing a cow. ‘A cow is designed to turn grass into milk (or butter) and grass is the best and most easily grown crop in the British Isles.’ And for at least six months of the year cows will feed themselves on it. I couldn’t have put it better or more succinctly myself.
In short, a man with no land at all could keep a few cows on ground that was producing nothing of nutritional value. At almost no expense he could have a gallon of milk a day and the meat from a bullock or two. In this way the annual loss of 500–600 small farms destroyed to make way for housing schemes, factories and roads could be mitigated. Thrower deplored the fact that rationing was still continuing seven years after the war, yet ‘the profligate expenditure of land continues. A grim day of reckoning must come.’ It is always invidious to predict the future, as Thomas Malthus would have learned had he lived long enough, and Dr Thrower was no different. Even though he could not foresee the sea change that was about to sweep across the farming world and domestic life, he was surely right about the wasted land and the food that could be produced from it. Had it not been for chemical fertilizers and pesticides and importing food from abroad, we would have needed this land lost to food production and the plucky little Dexter might have come into her own.
Moiled means ‘bare’ or ‘domed’ in Gaelic – as in Moel Famau (pronounced ‘Moil Vammer’), the round bare hill and highest point in Denbighshire – and refers to this old Irish polled breed. In Low’s time (1845), it was hardly known in England, but was apparently ubiquitous in Ireland, being most abundant around the River Shannon, and particularly at home in the ‘drumlin country’ of south Ulster. By the start of the twentieth century, the breed was confined to the three northern counties of Tyrone, Armagh and Sligo. Efforts by certain public-spirited leaders in Northern Ireland, notably Captain Herbert Dixon (later Lord Glentoran) and Captain J. Gregg, resulted in the formation of a society to promote it as a dual-purpose breed, particularly on the small hill farms in Ulster.
In 1929, the Irish Moiled Cattle Society laid down a preferred colour standard of red or roan with a white stripe down the back, white tail and white underparts, like a hairy Hereford or Longhorn. In 1949, G. Perceval-Maxwell started the Ballydugan herd and imported a polled bull, Hakku, from Finland. Captain Gregg firmly believed that the Vikings had ‘stolen’ Moiled cattle from Ireland and felt this new bull was an appropriate return of blood from the old type. Hakku did much to revivify the breed until the government passed new regulations that prevented bulls being registered for breeding unless their dams had a recorded milk yield. As most breeders of Moiled cattle did not record, the breed went into decline, so that by the 1970s there were only thirty pure cows and six bulls left with two breeders keeping the breed going. Recently, support from the Rare Breeds Survival Trust, financial incentives from the government and recognition of the value of native breeds adapted to the soil of their homeland and able to turn grass economically into beef have caused renewed interest in the Moiled. It has even been given the accolade of a class at the Royal Ulster Agricultural Society annual show at Balmoral Park in Belfast.
Moiled devotees claim they are the only indigenous Irish cattle left on the island. But Youatt, writing in 1834, did not mention a polled type, although he has seven pages on the Irish version of the old Craven or Lancashire Longhorn, with which he was considerably impressed. Nor is there any mention of polled Irish cattle by early English writers. Sir William Wilde, Oscar Wilde’s father, in a lecture to the Royal Irish Academy in 1858, ‘On the Modern and Ancient Races of Oxen in Ireland’, classified the Irish cattle existing in 1835 into four native types: the Longhorn, the Kerry, the ‘Old Irish Cow’ and the Irish Moiled, ‘the Maol or Moyle, the polled or hornless breed, similar to the Angus of the neighbouring Kingdom, called Myleen in Connaught, Mael in Munster and Mwool in Ulster’. They were medium-sized, dun, black or white, rarely mottled, not bad milkers, remarkably docile and much used for the draught or the plough. He distinguished them from the ‘old crooked-horned Irish’ – which seem to be the beasts depicted in the engraving of ‘Irish Cattle’ in Youatt’s book (p.181). These look remarkably like the Moiled – brindled, with a white stripe along the back and under the belly, but have the distinctive downward-pointing horns of a Longhorn.
This confusion might be put down to an ignorance of Ireland by English writers, because there seems little doubt that there had been polled cattle in Ireland for a long time. Polling appears spontaneously from time to time as a mutation in otherwise horned types. So a ‘polled breed’ is nothing more than breeding together two animals that have a dominant gene for polling and keeping on doing it by rejecting any animal with horns, until every animal is homozygous for polling. Thus it is hardly surprising that remains have been found in Ireland of a polled beast dating from AD 640. It is not proof of a polled breed; rather it shows that there was at least one polled animal. Even that most confirmed of hornless breeds, the Aberdeen Angus, regularly threw up horned animals until they were bred out by the early improvers. Moiled cattle most resemble a polled Longhorn, and it is more than likely that it is in this stock that they have their ancient origin.
To be fair to Captain Gregg, there are folk tales, nothing more, that claim that in their traffic between Ireland and Scandinavia, the Vikings took Moiled Irish cattle home with them. And there is a remarkably similar polled breed in Finland called Finn cattle, divided into three types, Eastern, Western and Northern, though they are of relatively recent formation. And so far as the evidence shows, the Vikings who raided and settled Ireland did not come from Finland. But as with anything to do with the origins of domestic livestock, nothing can be proved, which is why we are inevitably thrown back onto folk memory, speculation and fancy. The misty history of the Moiled’s origin fades into irrelevance compared with the modern story of its comeback amongst beef breeders in Ulster, who seem to have rediscovered a native polled beef breed that might one day rival the Scottish stock from their Celtic cousins across the water.
Over the centuries, Ireland has reared more cattle per acre than any other country. Its trade across St George’s Channel over the centuries brought enormous numbers of store cattle to the fattening pastures of England, supplementing the flow of Scottish beasts and t
he trickle of Welsh ones. By 1663, it was estimated that ‘for three years past there had been, one year with another, about 61,000 head of cattle brought over from Ireland in a year’. Tariffs were imposed to check the growing importation, which it was feared was flooding the English market, but they did little to reduce the rearing of cattle that had been taken up with enthusiasm by the Commonwealth settlers after Cromwell’s Act of Settlement of 1653. They shipped them over in their tens of thousands, to be bought by the graziers of East Anglia. In 1665, 57,545 cattle were shipped over on the hoof to English ports. They were popular and profitable because after a winter of semi-starvation in Ireland, where they were expected to survive on what they could pull, they filled out and fattened very quickly on the lush pastures of England.
Such was the volume of imports that certain landowners who believed they were suffering from the competition – whom Pepys called ‘the Western gentlemen’ – proposed a ban on the importation of Irish cattle. The Duke of Ormonde violently opposed it on the grounds that it would hamper Irish economic recovery after Cromwell’s devastations. The graziers of Norfolk and Suffolk feared for their business of ‘buying lean cattle and making them fat’ for the population of London, who also opposed the ban because they feared it would raise the price of beef. To the surprise of its opponents, however, in 1667 Parliament passed ‘An Additional Act against the Importation of Forreign Cattel’, prohibiting the importation of live cattle.
As is often the case with measures intended to protect agriculture, the consumer suffered because the ban did indeed raise the price of meat. The graziers were forced to buy store cattle at much higher prices from the West Country, Wales and Scotland. And it stimulated smuggling into ports in the west, which was connived at by the authorities. Ireland responded by slaughtering at home and selling carcases, and many farmers switched to keeping large flocks of sheep. Some ran to 20,000, mainly owned by English settlers, who had imported English breeds whose wool was said to be the equal of any from Leicestershire. The embargo lasted until 1863, even though it was observed more in the breach. For example, Youatt records that there were 79,285 live cattle exported from Ireland in 1812 (many to provision the navy during the French war) despite the embargo.
Till the Cows Come Home Page 21