Off the Radar

by Te Radar

  It isn’t because of this that Mel the producer has been adamant that we shouldn’t get a pig. Rather, it is due to the fact that she has a soft spot for them. Most people think they are cute, and express anxiety that these endearing little guys are destined to be killed. Whenever that happens, I politely ask if they want to feed them. People usually leap at the chance and toddle off with a bucket and an air of benevolence.

  Invariably they return, ashen faced, asking, ‘How soon before they go?’ It seems there is little as off-putting about a pig as encountering the voracity of their appetites.

  When entering the pen, the first thing that Willy and JT do is to come trotting up on their little hams to sniff and nibble me to see if I am indeed a source of food. Were I to fall over, I no doubt would be.

  Often when I am in the pen, fixing the fence so that they can’t escape, I find myself squatting down, and the cleft in my buttocks, exposed as it is above the top of my shorts, is given a thorough nuzzling by their damp little snouts.

  It isn’t an entirely unpleasant sensation; it feels oddly ticklish and amusingly inappropriate.

  In the end though, they do make for some mighty tasty eating.

  27

  A bull at the gate

  I will never forget how surprised I was at the rate at which a cow’s uterus contracts after calf birth. I witnessed this biological phenomenon as I stood clutching the slick organ in my hands, while the vet, who was herself heavy with child at the time, hastily sewed it back up after a successful bovine caesarean section.

  It was a quite an experience for a nine-year-old.

  My fascination with the procedure was rivalled only by that of my dog, Spot, who stood looking on, pensive and pleading, timidly edging forward for a chance to snatch a potential titbit. He seemed perplexed as to why we were putting everything back in again.

  One has to become quite intimate with animals as a farmer. Take cows for example. If you’re not scratching their heads, or massaging their udders, you’re thrusting your hand up their jacksies. There is probably a scientific term for this procedure, but I don’t know it.

  I think of this as I stand in the middle of the paddock rubbing Vaseline onto Harriet’s cracked nipples in order to ease the discomfort from her split teats. Judging by the enormity of her udder, she is due to calve, and the warm summer weather is causing the splitting.

  I can sympathise. The skin on my fingers is splitting too. It is quite painful.

  I always admired my father’s hands. They were firmly solid, and roughened by years of farming. My hands, formerly the white, soft hands of a city dweller, have now morphed back into the quasi-rugged land-hands I had been used to as a boy.

  What I wasn’t expecting was that they would cause me such aggravation. Blisters I expected. Calluses are unavoidable. But having the skin splitting is not something I was prepared for. The small splits prove annoyingly painful—like a multitude of paper cuts. The ones that afflict the top of my thumb and index fingers are the worst. Every time I want to grasp something, or put my hands in my pockets to retrieve something, the splits get knocked and reopen.

  My skin is a network of crisscrossing lacerations. I don’t know why I expect Vaseline to fix Harriet, when I am applying it with my fingers and they get no better.

  As it is difficult to induce a cow to give birth on cue, I am alone at the farm when Harriet goes into labour. There’s not a lot that can be done to help at these early stages. All I can do is check on her occasionally, casting a mildly experienced eye over things and noting the discharge, the dilation, and the slightly agitated look in her eyes. Goodness only knows what she is thinking.

  What I’m waiting for is the appearance of feet. This is the first real indication as to whether things are going smoothly. They should be the front feet, with the hooves facing down. Shortly after this, the calf’s muzzle and head should appear, then its shoulders, and then it should fall out.

  If the back feet appear, then it is a breech birth and the chances are it could well be problematic.

  As a child I attended large numbers of these births and there is nothing remotely gentle about hauling the calf out. It’s brutal. I am hoping, for everyone’s sake, especially Harriet’s, that things will go smoothly.

  Having never had children of my own, I haven’t experienced the human variation of the process. For some reason none of my friends have seen fit to invite me to share this joyous experience with them. But I can imagine that it’s not all candles and huffing together and wiping tiny beads of sweat off your beloved’s forehead, as the two of you hum madrigals and think of baby names.

  As night cloaks the proceedings and there is no progress, I retire to the caravan. Harriet seems to be becoming a little sick of my voyeuristic interest in her nether regions. I check her before sleeping, and again when I wake at 3.00 a.m.

  I feel as if I should dawdle around the paddock in the dark and see how she is, even though there will be little if anything I can do at that stage. She looks at me with a look in her eye that seems to say that this whole thing would be a lot more appropriate if only I were wearing pants. But it’s summer, and the nights are muggy.

  At dawn she is standing next to a bright-eyed, little ginger-haired calf.

  I’m a father!

  The tiny calf has obviously been in the world outside her womb for some time, as he is standing, and clean of any placental residue. Mother and son seem to be doing well.

  He’s looking for her teat, but her gargantuan udder is slung low under her belly and he is searching too high. She stands patiently until finally he latches on and devours the warm colostrum.

  Milk is dripping from her teats, as she is producing far more than her new boy can ever hope to consume, and I am soon required to milk her to relieve the pressure. She allows me to do this as she stands in the middle of the paddock. What a remarkable cow.

  As I strip one udder, the calf is guzzling away on the other side, tail flapping, mouth firmly clamped to a teat, a creamy froth on his lips.

  Even as a very young child, I was no stranger to where calves came from. They came out of cows. And how were they put in there? Well, the artificial breeding technician placed them in there by inserting his/her arm into the cow, then injecting the seed that would produce the calf from a long, thin, clear straw they had just removed from where it was clenched in their teeth.

  The straw had come from a large stainless steel barrel the technician had arrived with. The barrel, encased in a wickerwork basket, contained lots of straws of calf seed in a liquid that would freeze your finger off in an instant if you were foolish enough to put it into the container.

  Oddly for the danger it posed, you never really heard much about liquid nitrogen accidents, nor any crimes being committed with it as a weapon.

  ‘I’ve got liquid nitrogen—freeze!’

  Witnessing the miracle of cow impregnation happening on so many occasions has, I suspect, rather demystified the notion of the reproductive act as a tender moment of intimacy.

  Only recently did it occur to me that I had never even thought about the process that led to the capture, in a straw, of the seed that would be planted.

  I comprehend this as I stand watching a man masturbating a bull.

  Actually, it appears to be a job that requires two men—one to perform the physical act of releasing and capturing the ejaculate, and another man to hold the head of the bull as it rides a dry mount and to make noises of a bovinely erotic nature while it does so. I am not sure whether making the noise is part of his job description, but the man seems rather good at it.

  These chaps aren’t amateurs. This is what they do for a living. They are just two of the friendly folk that work at the farm and seed extraction facility of LIC (Livestock Improvement Corporation) on the rural outskirts of Hamilton.

  Inside its tree-lined acres live the most virile and perfect examples of stud bulls in the dairy industry, whose seed will fertilise cows’ wombs for years to come.

 
It’s not until I witness the procedure that I realise I may, if it is indeed possible given what I have just described, have romanticised it slightly.

  The dry mount is a small bull or steer, used for the purpose of giving the bull something to become excited by and mount. Their tail is tied down so as to avoid any accidental entry.

  The bull mounts the steer several times, until such time as he is considered suitably aroused. Then it’s time to introduce the collection receptacle, known as the AV, or artificial vagina.

  The AV is about 50 centimetres long, and tubular shaped. When I first saw it, a large industrial thermometer was violating its open end, as it’s crucial that it has the correct internal temperature so as not to shock the bull into failing to complete his task.

  And they are valuable bulls. One bull, known as 96329 SRB Collins Royal Hugo, or more simply as ‘The King’, has been responsible for over 1.5 million inseminations over the course of his working life, and is estimated to have earned the dairy industry over $20 million.

  This all happens with not a cow in sight. The last cow these sires ever see is most likely to be their mother as they are taken from her and shipped to the facility. Here they remain, living in gay abandon, until such time as they are deemed by a ruthless statistical analysis to be surplus to requirements and are transformed into burgers.

  As for the men who collect the seed? I have no idea what inspires them to apply for this most necessary of jobs. Does it begin as a hobby? Do they confess to doing the job they love? What part of their work can they take home? What do they put down when asked to state their occupation? Bull handler doesn’t seem quite right.

  Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying performing the task is shameful. Indeed, had they asked me if I wished to have a go, I most certainly would not have turned down the offer, if for no other reason than that I could say that I have. And who wouldn’t want to be able to say that?

  This kind of lifestyle is not to be an option for Harriet’s healthy baby boy. I have decided to call him Barry, after auburn-haired gardening goddess Maggie Barry.

  He will remain healthy, but there will come a time when he will no longer be a boy. Of all the animal interaction to be had on a farm, castrating calves is one of my least favourite activities, possibly because of some subconscious resistance to the removal of such a symbol of masculinity.

  I could never participate in cutting them off, which seems too barbaric, but it is certainly quicker than the slow withering induced by the rubber ring method, which cuts off the blood supply until the testes gradually atrophy and fall off.

  I’ve known people in relationships like that.

  I have to confess to being quite surprised at the warmth of Barry’s scrotum as I cup it in my hand and test its weight. It is firm and slightly furry. My surprise manifests itself in the spontaneous uttering of the phrase, ‘Oh, it’s warm’, which causes great mirth amongst the film crew, and general mocking of me.

  While in Mali I had the great fortune of being taken to the oddest religious site I have ever encountered. High on an escarpment above a village, an overhanging ledge protects an area of flat dirt. The cliff walls that surround it appear to have been extensively graffiti’d, but rather than the illicit scrawlings of a dispossessed youth, it is instead the artwork of generations of the young boys of the Dogon tribe. In the middle of the area was a stone, worn smooth by the rubbing of thousands of squirming naked buttocks, as generations of boys wriggled and winced their way through the coming-of-age ritual of circumcision.

  It made me glad that in New Zealand the most we might do on our 18th birthday is to skull a yard glass of beer.

  For some reason, the job in Mali is done by the blacksmith, which lends itself to a wealth of questions. Given that this is not his primary area of expertise, where would you want to go in the general scheme of things? At the front of the line, to get it over and done with? Or near the end when he is more proficient? Would he become merely workmanlike in the middle, and become casually offhand? Would he sharpen the knife between encounters? And more importantly, what happens to the remains? It seemed impolite to ask.

  The initiates have to stay on the ledge for a couple of weeks post procedure, hence the art on the rocks. There’s little else to do except heal and paint.

  The ledge looks down over the village, and my guides pointed to the house where the female circumcision was carried out. Like the practice itself, it is shielded from people’s eyes by being conducted indoors. I never asked quite how much female flesh was excised in that ceremony. I could only hope not much. The girls apparently didn’t then have a month off to do arts and crafts; they went straight back to work.

  There’s little in the way of ritual when it comes to ministering to Barry. The ring stretches out just far enough to almost—but not quite—allow me to slide it easily over his testicles. A little judicious massaging is required, and before the ring is released you need to ascertain that both of the plums (as they are known in the country) are located below the ring, in what Shawn charmingly refers to as the purse. Then the ring is released, it squeezes the top of the scrotum, Barry twitches, I twitch, and all is done.

  And why is it done? Well, steers—as castrated bulls are known—are a lot easier to handle than bulls in their complete state. There is no rampant male aggression, no fighting, or breaking fences, digging holes, or accosting hapless cows and impregnating them when they shouldn’t. They also grow differently—taller and with more elegant, feminine lines.

  However, for all of those women who over the years have accused men of having their brain in their pants, well, in my experience, the stupidity of the steer may just prove them right. I have always found them to be a little bit dumber than they should be. It’s most disconcerting.

  As a child, I remember once opening up the scrotum of a dead bull to reveal his testicles. They were about 15 centimetres long, glistening white, with smudgy black veins in them. They looked like giant, shiny jellybeans. I left them on the ground, turned my back to do something else, and when I looked back I saw the last of them disappearing whole down the throat of my dog, Spot.

  How he managed to swallow them both I shall never know, but if a fox terrier is feisty at the best of times, imagine what he’s like with two bull testicles inside him.

  I don’t think he slept for three days.

  28

  Playing possum

  If you have ever smelt a possum, then you will have a fair idea of what they taste like. They taste not dissimilar to the way they smell. Pungently musky. More disconcertingly, their carcasses, stripped of their skins, resemble those of a little man, or a monkey. It’s like eating a leprechaun.

  I have been hunting possum as a food source since the day I moved to the farm, but with little success. Rather than looking to shoot them, or employing the simple drive-around-at-night-and-run-them-over technique, I am attempting to catch them with the Timms trap.

  The Timms trap is a bright-yellow box equipped with a spring-loaded metal bar that kills the possum instantly by breaking its neck or crushing its windpipe. Either way, for the possum, the result must come as a disappointing surprise, but it is considered to be one of the most humane ways to dispose of them.

  The best thing about these traps is that when you go to unload the trap, the possum is dead, unlike a cage trap. My mother employed the baited cage as a way to capture possums. The problem was that you then ended up with an angry possum in a cage. What on earth do you do with them then?

  When my mother caught possums, she would either have them shot or she would drop the cage containing the possum into the water trough.

  I used to think this was a little rough, but while recording my Dispatches from the Provinces series for National Radio, I decided to ring the Department of Conservation and ask them what they recommended. I informed them that I had a possum in a cage and that I didn’t know what to do with it. I could barely believe my ears when, without a moment’s hesitation, a silken-voiced woman responded by sa
ying that I should drop it in a creek. She added that once I was positive it was dead, I should ensure that the cage and the possum were removed from the water, as I wouldn’t want to pollute the creek.

  Crikey.

  As gruesome as that sounds, the Environment Bay of Plenty website says that should you capture a live possum, you should drag it out of the cage by the tail, making sure to leave its front feet on the ground so that it will not be inclined to clamber up the nearest incline, which will most likely be you.

  This will also distract it long enough for you to deliver a blow slightly forward of its ears, with a big stick or a hammer, stunning the critter long enough for you to lay it on a firm, hard place and deliver, with your stick or hammer, the coup de grâce. This is not a technique for the faint-hearted.

  It is, however, less brutal than their recommended method of disposing of magpies, which is by smashing their heads into a post.

  They are a different kind of folk down there in the sunny Bay of Plenty.

  Initially, I wanted a possum for its meat. Or rather, Jane wanted it as meat for me. She thought it would have a suitably sustainable aura.

  We hadn’t counted on its unsustainable aroma. Now though, I want them for their warmth.

  A friend of mine bought a Timms trap to catch a possum that was plaguing a tree at the bottom of his section.

  He caught the possum and reset the trap on the off-chance there was another one. There was. He continued to set the trap and catch them, until eventually he decided he should do something with the skins. He tanned them and then had them fashioned into a blanket. It was luxurious, seeming to generate its own heat when you lay on it.