A Year of Cows by S. V. Morgan (Part Two)

In this occasional series for The Clearing S. V. Morgan spends a year with cattle and reflects on their sentience, cognition and our relationship with them. In Part Two she considers calving and motherhood.

Birth usually takes place at a distance from the herd, in a shady corner of the field, far from human gaze. This is when the pull towards the herd is momentarily broken, and the cow’s focus turns towards the new calf curled asleep in the grass, hidden from predators. Though not always. Some mothers are neglectful or absent-minded. Sometimes the call to the group – that strong, self-protective impulse – remains the most dominant instinct.

The calf generally comes fast and the moment is easy to miss. It arrives diving forefeet, then nose and mouth-first into the world, and slithers to the ground, breaking the umbilical connection. The mother turns immediately to lick it free of the membrane that encloses it. It rouses, perhaps lets out a little cry, eventually staggers to its feet and fumbles for the teat. All of this can happen in a few minutes.

The most solicitous mothers stay rigorously close to their calves when they are born. What determines who will and won’t, who can say? Some internal balance of nature and nurture, of hormones and their own embedded experience of being mothered must surely play a part in this.

Then they feed, groom, protect, they provide nurture and attention – everything we call loving. They surround their calves with a low steady hum. It is soothing, warning, enveloping; a net cast over them, keeping them close, communicating danger if need be. This aural protection continues for a few weeks… and then lapses into an occasional warning signal.

I watch a mother stay behind with her new-born while the rest go off out of sight, into a higher field. Overcoming these divided loyalties, she chooses to stay with her calf. All day she croons to it, lays beside it, licks and ministers to it. From time to time, it pulls itself to its feet, stumbles and suckles a little then sinks down again next to her. She is watchful and devoted. Time stretches to encapsulate them in this bubble. When the moment is right, they join the herd and the web that held them close slips wider. The new calf merges with the others and the cow moves away to be with her peers, back to cropping intently to make milk for her new-born.

Over the course of the year, I witness this mother bond forming many times over. It is fierce and pure, an essence of itself. How can we not speak of safety, pleasure and comfort when we talk of these animals? And by extension, of pain, distress, anxiety, separation, loss. Even longing? Where does one cluster of emotions cease to be applicable?

Time that heals all wounds, heals their wounds. The mother whose calf struggled to life and died in the first day, searched and called for her offspring. But after a day or two, the milk flow stops to remind her of her loss and she stops searching, stops calling, stops hurrying across the field, backwards and forwards. Stops raising her head in inquiry and dismay and drops it back to the business of eating, merges back with the herd. Do their bodies, like ours, carry the reverberations of these losses?

Long awaited, 201 has had her calf. Seems that for days she was restless and the little herd moved with her, because she is a dominant cow. Last night she was calling at the gate. I let her through but after a while she returned to the upper field.

In July the hay-making begins. The race is underway to cut the grass, turn and bale the hay before it rains. When the last bales have been stacked in the barn, the old prayers and hymns are evoked: all is safely gathered in. I think of the beautiful ancient liturgy of farmer, land, and animals upon it.

On a very hot day in August, 436 is spotted in a field of young heifers showing signs of preparing to give birth. Not yet fully grown herself she has somehow been impregnated by the bull. She is brought thrashing, rigid with panic, into the crush. The calf will have to be cut out of her. She is sedated and gradually quiets to a dreamy state. I watch as the vet slices into her hide, muscle wall, and then her uterus. He reaches into this cavity – neat, not gushing blood – and pulls from it a package. A long sequence of bones in a bag of flesh unfolds from within.

I watch the creature as it is lifted out of her. It is sleek inside its slippery membrane, inanimate, long like a comma with its large head. For a moment, the thing is unresponsive, poised between living and not. I see the moment before life. Then a flash of animation surges through, forcing open the eyes, revealing the rich gleam of being and feeling. The first thing we do is clear the airways of mucous, then register the gender. It is a bull calf, once tagged it will become 484. I stroke the membrane from its body, since its mother is still held in the crush and cannot perform this task, until it staggers to its feet and lets out a bleat for milk.

This unexpected birth means that 436 loses her peers and fetches up in a field of much older cows, all birthing and mothering. Mature hefty cows who rudely nose her out of the way and consign her to the bottom of the heap.

Months later, when I watch the birth scene in For Sama – a documentary shot during the siege of Aleppo – I’m taken back to that moment, when I saw the mystery distilled to a point. Another Caesarian birth, again the long package pulled from the mother’s body. And again, for long minutes – or so it seemed – the baby remained inert, and was stretched and pounded towards life. Then finally the eyes shot open, that gleam of life, and the mouth twisted and gave a cry. Such a mournful, pain-wrung cry as life returned to the creature and the long unfolding of limbs recomposed itself into a human child.

The calves skitter about with their tails lifted like question marks. They cluster together, plop down in the grass. They use the same movement as their mothers for descending and rising – forward-back, fold and drop – but it is so fluid in them, they can kick back and leap to their feet in less than an instant. They seem to fly upwards.

When dusk descends the youngest catch a tide of exuberant excess energy – they careen about in a group, pounding the ground with their little hooves, they go head-to-head and test their strength against each other, they leap and dart around their mothers, teasing, provoking, wanting a response. They let out little round belly bleats of excitement. But the mothers ignore them in stately fashion as mothers do, or hasten after them, head lifted and udders swinging, signalling anxiety and intent.

One of the smallest is pestering her mother, who lies chewing the cud while she is butted and engaged in mock fight. She pushes the calf off with what must be a hint of universal maternal exasperation. Leave me be. Go and play elsewhere. The calf darts at her and continues the game, only excited by the refusal.

When they are a little older, they respond in kind and groom their mothers, sometimes other cows too. I have seen a sick cow being licked by a group of calves. Sometimes a single cow elects to stay with the calves and watch over them while the others graze further off.

All infants sleep a lot, manifest bursts of energy and a desire to play, are more curious and more easily frightened than their elders. They mock fight. They test with their mouths. They push out the boundaries of what feels safe. They all, as they grow, explore further from the mother figure, if safety has been sufficiently established. When they wander, they are routinely summoned back to their mothers by their calling.

The cows do their living inside the fields and the sheds. Birthing, feeding, watering, moving, sheltering, and sometimes sickness and dying. I observe their particular language of being separate and together. The bond that holds them together as a herd continuously loosens and pulls tight in a kind of murmuration. The symbiotic union of cow and calf relaxes and releases over time. The group undulates back and forth across the field over the course of the day, spreading out and coming together, making its way munching at a leisurely pace, stopping here and there to rest and chew. In the hottest part of the day they seek out shade. Towards evening they will often head upwards.

The distant echo of their migratory impulse is played out within the parameters of their fields. Often, watching them from afar, I’m reminded of other large mammals in the wild. Herd animals in a larger landscape. On the move for new pasture, for shade, for the next watering spot. Coming over the rise in the evening sun, the light drenching the grasses, slow moving dark bulky shapes with their calves wobbling beside them, calling to those that stray. Calling to each other, and their honking repeats from hillside to hillside. It might be the Serengeti. Wild and free means exposed to all kinds of dangers. To the cruelty of nature that picks off the weak and the sick, that devastates with drought, disease and predators.

These herds adhere to the old formations, but remain content within their circumscription as long as the humans maintain their side of the bargain; to keep them safe and keep them fed. They are circumscribed, but isn’t life in essence an experience of circumscription, for every one of us? Freedom can only ever be a relative attribute – longed for but never truly attained.

From across the paddock I watch the steers as we remove the electric fencing to let them into the next field. They are alert to something, trying to figure it out, leaping to conclusions that don’t serve, such as following us along the hedge away from the gate, which slows up the process and requires us to circle back behind them to guide them in the right direction.

‘Stupid animals, not the brightest’, says the farmer. I can only think of our own comparative stupidity. Our intelligence being greater often only by a few degrees. Alert and trying to figure things out, some of us, but deprived, most of us, of the intelligence of the greater picture, motivated by wanting to get to the next field, the next satisfactory mouthful, heads down again.

But their intelligence – wary, assessing – is a faculty that serves them; they know the best morsels, they know when they have eaten down the best grass and are ready to move on. They are highly discerning when it comes to quality of hay and grass. Some farmers swear that they know how to medicate themselves with certain plants. They learn the map of each field and the gates that link them, where the best shade can be found, where to find the water trough. Quick as a flash they can find their way past or through any weakness in hedging or fencing, especially if the grass on the other side is more appealing.

Who leads, and who is being lead? asks James Rebanks: ‘It was not clear to me whether the cows worked for my grandfather, or the other way around.’ There are times when the farmer acknowledges that in some ways their knowing is superior.

And yet the killing of cows, and production of meat – our food – this is after all what underwrites all this beautiful, various life. Every month, sometimes twice a month, a steer is singled out and put in a pen alone, ready to be taken for slaughter. An animal, at twenty-four months, in the prime of its life. That steer is often distrustful, complaining, on edge. The last we see and think of it is when it mounts the ramp into the van and is taken away. But the farmer knows what lies beyond the ramp and the van, has made inspections, has made peace with what he deems a reasonable contract with his animals.

There is an ambivalence in me about this harvesting and eating, even as I consume the meat. There is something unresolved here for me that grows as I watch them and get to know their ways. About our food as an end product to all this rich life. About all this rich life existing for our meat. This sacrifice requires at the very least a form of reverence, as the animal behaviourist Temple Grandin invites us to recognise. To circle back to the veneration of our early ancestors.

***

S. V. Morgan has a doctorate from Cambridge University and taught for a year at Bristol University before moving to Rome where she worked for a UN organisation specialising in agricultural development. She has recently returned to the UK and is completing a novel about an Italian Partisan and the violent aftermath of the Italian Resistance. Follow her on instagram @sarai_vimo.

Photograph courtesy of the author.