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

In this new occasional series for The Clearing S. V. Morgan spends a year with cattle and reflects on their sentience, cognition and our relationship with them.

Summer pastures at seven am. I’m walking, booted and bare-armed, among a herd of cows. Dewdrops on the grass, the sun swells upwards and the chatter of birds fills my head. Behind me, up to the crest of the hill and beyond, there are woods of old plantings and new, where foxes bark at night and owls call to each other. Before me, the gentle rise and fall of farmland, the ancient patchwork of fields, hedges, ditches and copses, where you are likely, at almost any time of day, to see the white rump of a deer bounding back into the tree cover, the white rump of a hare skimming across a field.

After more than two decades of life in a European city, I have landed randomly on a farm in south-west England, to discover that this is what I needed. To quiet myself. To rinse myself of the press and urgency of other humans. In this year of being mostly alone, I turn to the cows for a form of connection; the farmer needs occasional help, and I remember being a small child who lit up around animals. I begin to watch them, take pleasure in being around them, and little by little they nudge their way into my thoughts and become a focal point. All kinds of questions and considerations, like the swarms of flies that follow the cattle, arise in my mind and buzz about my head. I can’t get enough of being near them, watching them doing their living, as if there were a mystery they might reveal if I paid enough attention. The steady pace of their lives, their unhurried ways. All the striving and anxiety – the thoughts that plague me – have no meaning for them. They appear to be blissfully free, occupying only the instinctual present moment, free from the tormenting knowledge of their own selves, their own lives and their own death. For their part, I am also an unanswered question, though they have accepted me among them, and that feels like a gift.

From afar. They go through their day lying, standing, feeding, circling the field. They scatter, they come together. They form shapes and compositions. They advance in a perfect line as they chomp down on the good grass, a line that is perfectly broken by a few stragglers. They rock forward, they sway. Dreamy and sensual the bulk of them, with their counterpoints – the legs that dwindle and are delicate, the tails that swish, the heads that nod, the big sensitive furred ears that flick and enquire, suggesting alertness and sometimes even coquetry. Attuning, interpreting, calculating. The big brown eyes, the smooth short fur of their hides. The wet noses that explore the ground – the world – taking in scents and textures, things to like and things to be wary of. The long tongues that extend to lick, taste and grasp.

Once they were not animals relegated to the margins of our existence, featureless creatures in a landscape, many but the same; stinks and messes and noises. Once they were our wealth and livelihood. Cattle and chattel, these words are very closely related. They existed at the centre of our world, they lived alongside us, often in rooms within our homes. In some parts of the world riches are still measured by the number of cattle owned. In rural Madagascar, for example, you might dress in tatters but your zebu herd is your kingdom.

As I watch them in their yearly round of insemination, birth, mothering, weaning – out in the fields in the warmer months, into the sheds in the winter – I am brought to reflect on how this primordial bond is still  present in our language, our archetypes and our thinking about ourselves. On our interactions and the mirroring they offer us. On what we can know of what they know. And what exists between us, human and animal.

Look at the vocabulary relating to cattle, the metaphors that resurface in our language, embedded back beyond our knowing by our ancestors and their forefathers, when these animals were at the centre of their world. These tropes still weave in and out of everyday language. Cow, bull and all the related naming. Cow, cowed, coward – these words all mingle in their origins. Cow, as an insult against woman, is centuries old – and expresses a turning against the fecundity of the female (swollen belly, heavy breasts, multiple pregnancies). Bully and bullish – using physical advantage (but then not only) to intimidate and oppress. Horned and cuckolded; the dupe, subjugated, disempowered by betrayal. Pollarded, like trees, deprived of their most effective defences. Milk and milking, being milked. Bovine; slow, stupid, solid, stubborn or submissive. This language that we dwell in, all these categories and attributes make up a lexicon of our relationship with these animals that is preoccupied with power and control. It speaks of the entwining of our lives over millennia, and the interplay of dominance and submission, the interdependence that we have come to call domestication.

Deeper in our own history, what comes through to us from this long acquaintance and the gradual evolving of interdependence is not just the subjugation, but the worship of cattle. We saw in them characteristics both fearsome and potent, we received from them their flesh and milk, and we were inspired to gratitude and reverence. We attributed to them magical qualities. The sacred cow, the holy cow – still to this day prevailing in Hindu culture and religion. The female and the male of the species both raised up, set apart. Thus, they first enter our imagination; as potent, oracular, sacrificial beasts.

Perhaps, in its origins, it was a form of magical thinking; the subservience of these animals to our needs, our need for their subservience. Then the assertion of a dominance not yet quite sure of itself. The summoning of our powers over much larger animals, and eventually the arrogance that came of that.

I move among them, barely disturbing them now. I have become a kind of familiar. Their heads bounce as they graze. In one fluid movement they lower neck, mouth and tongue to gather in the grasses then champ down with their jaws. There is a leisurely urgency in this taking in of food. Focus and concentration. Crop crop crop.

When the flies are bad, they cluster head to tail and the white-tipped tails lash and flick the worst of them off. The bodies move constantly, as the lower rank cows are jostled and nudged out of line; a continuous repositioning.

Mornings, when they have some good grazing behind them and are ready to chew the cud they descend to the ground. One by one they rock forward onto their knees then subside onto their folded back legs, with a groan and a creak and displacement of air beneath them. Their udders bulge from under. They settle in, the flesh parting at the spine to spill like boulders in both directions. Their lower jaws work, slicing and circling, their eyes narrow and close, and they fall silent, but for little groans and creaks, huffs and sighs.

I think about archetypes. Cattle have been bred for thousands of years to display the characteristics and qualities of male and female to a fault. Fertility and potency. The cow, bred for productivity, birthing, mothering, milking – ever-giving with her bulging udders heavy with milk. The bulls for breeding, for bulk (more meat, more money), for stamina and potency. Archetypal qualities that we have lived alongside, and no doubt unconsciously reflected back upon our own notions of ourselves, that have contributed to defining gender difference and fixing gender archetypes. To what degree, we can only guess.

I am always enthralled by the powerful body of the bull, the menace and danger that he embodies, that is evoked through him or projected onto him. The myths and stories of bulls that our cultures are steeped in suggest that this is a collective fascination.

My first encounter up close is with a rig, a partially castrated male; not quite a bull. He is a fine looking, nervously-moving animal enclosed in a pen in the barn. He has been singled out for slaughter. I am struck by his corrugated wild and angry stare, the power in his body, contained not so much by the walls of the pen but by his being domesticated. Even in his disquiet, it is bred into him to submit.

Although he scrutinises me, he does not exactly meet my gaze. I feel into the impossibility of comprehending one another, the breach between human and animal, and a longing to explore beyond it, to reach into the inner world of this creature before me.

Similarly contemplating the chasm between human and animal, Ted Hughes observes the bull Moses, ‘the brow like masonry, the deep-keeled neck’[1], whose tremendous power is reduced to a state of absolute submission in captivity, telescoped to the ring through its nose. From the brink of that gulf Hughes observes and feels the tantalising inability to reach through or past it. ‘Too deep in itself to be called to’, this fearsome potency is asleep to itself. The creature registers little or nothing of the external world. Has the process of subjugation worked this horror on the bull? Or is it his animal being that is locked out of the expansive sunlit world of human consciousness?

There are two bulls  on this farm. Solstice is the larger, a creature of tremendous heft, but gentlemanly, not a protagonist, content to merge among his females. He has sired generations of offspring. He is mild, not courageous or threatening, just remarkable for his size and his fertility. Still, deliberately or not, his nearly 1,000 kilos could crush you in an instant, I am reminded by the farmer.

It is said of a fine bull that he ‘throws good calves’ – as if they were tossed from him with one mount. Surrounded by his offspring – does he recognise them to be such? Would he know if they were not?

Legacy, only slightly less colossal, with thick lumpy curls on his forehead, is more of a showman. A bull who is always vocalizing, whose pattern of discourse runs from a low belly grumble to a moan, to a long crescendo of shrieks blasted from the nasal cavity.

Passing on to a new field Legacy is waylaid by the presence of the other bull across the road. He starts up with the growling. He lowers his head to the grass and pounds into the ground with his fore hooves. His hormones, his being a bull, also program him to confront and do battle with another male. So he forgets for a moment his herd of females and calves who have already been led onto the downs at the top of the hill. Eventually the farmer persuades him out of his battle stance and they advance slowly, walking side by side up through the field to the gate. Legacy swings his bulk as he moves, still grumbling and reluctant.

I think about what we expect of the bull. He is expected to exceed in every way. We want awe and fear. We want the frisson. More potent, more fearsome, quicker to anger, larger, greater. In our subconscious perhaps these attributes merge with those of the human male? We want and expect that raw ingredient; more power and more ferocity.

The archetypal masculinity of the bull can’t help but fascinate. It comes up from deep in our culture, our mythologies, our collective subconscious. The aurochs depicted in the Paleolithic cave paintings of Lascaux. The sacred winged bulls guarding ancient Sumerian palaces. The Minotaur of Crete. The bull fight; the colossal bulk, the deadly horns, the rage of the animal pitted against the wit and agility of the comparatively tiny human male.

We admire the traits of masculinity, we have raised them almost above all else. We have allowed them to spill into abuses. Is it in our nature to bully those weaker than ourselves, as it is in theirs?

The cattle have their invisible rankings, their cruelties to each other as well as their tendernesses. Bullying in fact is what they all do, bulls to steers, cows to heifers, calves among calves, bigger to smaller (but not always), and so down the chain.

Two cows are going head-to-head in the field. A third is attendant. They turn and turn. The calves get excited and dart about. In these contests the lowest ranking females are often wounded by the others. I can pick them out by their limping.

***

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.

[1] Ted Hughes, The Bull Moses