Bog Myrtle & Peat

Another calf that wouldn’t suck, and I should do away with this cow with her tits like chapel hat pegs. She’s just too big, and her calves find it so hard to suck from her that it wears them down to the bone. They’re keen at first, but with several successive failures, they begin to wilt because nothing’s born with a full battery. They have just enough to get started, and if they don’t they’ll die. It doesn’t help that one of this cow’s teats is weedit-out; it’s empty and dry with a fold in the middle. The calf sucks this because it’s easy, and it wastes its work on a busted flush. That teat will never bring forth milk again, and I can see how some of the old-timers would shear it off with snips to save the calf’s confusion.

I had to learn the hard way about this cow and her teats, and now when her calf is born I seek for the signs of sucking – for the black teats which are suddenly clean and crisp as crepe paper. I take this step for granted with other cows, and I hardly bother to check if they’re sucked because there would be no cows in the world if every one had to be helped. But it’s more or less the same with this cow every year, and each time there’s work and frustration in gathering her to the pens and stripping her out to a jug or a bucket.

The milk head’s thick and the bœstings gold as whinn flowers in the bottle with its teat and the cream gone sticky as glue in your palms. Even an ailing calf is strong enough to fill my hands, and it’s a fight to get them down and pull their cramping jaws apart. The rubber fits neatly across the splayed-out teeth, and then the bastard can hardly help itself from sucking – the mechanism is triggered and the intake starts. Even when you’re holding it badly between your knees and the pupils roll to reveal a thready mesh of blood-vessels in the under-eye, there’s an unstoppable gollup and smack of the hot milk landing. 

It’s painful, hard and maddening stuff, and everybody says that I should send this cow away for raising the same concerns every year. Most people use “send her away” as a euphemism – but there are more explicit ways to make the point, and my neighbour says he can “cut the throat” of every problem which lies before him. Empty cow? Cut its throat. Hooves to trim? Cut its throat. I haven’t told him about this cow which requires such a weight of extra help because I know what he’d say – and it’s not his fault. I believe he’s a man of deep compassion and care, but his business now hangs on carbon audits to save the world, and there are no passengers on a farm; only on the aeroplanes which grind around the cloudless sky.

When the battle’s won and the calf has learned to suck for itself, I can stand back and listen to the sound of progress which glows for the labour which drove it. If I am soft in this, it’s only because I love this cow – and they all need care in different ways. Beyond a hard start, she makes an excellent mother, and she’s given me plenty of pleasure over the last ten years. Her heifer calves have normal teats, and her little bulls are fat before they find the freezer. Beyond the sound of sucking cream, there’s a cuckoo calling in the trees – and pearls of snow which tremble on the distant blue horizon. The heavy hills are drying into spring, and the work itself is calling.

Back when there was time to attend to problems like these, every cow would be known for its strengths and weaknesses – and big teats were just something to be aware of. If a cow like mine was driven to the ring in the old days, buyers would look for her teats and the price would fall accordingly. But she’d still have a price, and having paid less, the buyer would make up the difference in labour. And if she got away with nothing more than a snipped-off teat, it’s surely better than our new solution to tiny imperfection. For my part, I know when this cow’s due to calve – and as a consequence, I take the time to watch her carefully and respond. It feels fair, and a gesture of defiance to a world which has learned to cut the throat of anything less than “easy”.

(Picture by Louis le Brocquy, from Kinsella’s Táin)