Bog Myrtle & Peat

An Irishman told me that steers grow faster and taller if you leave them uncut for as long as you can. So by accident and this advice, I kept two calves entire until they were ten months old. Then I called the vet, and it’s said that men are squeamish of talk about the severance of bollocks. Even if we do not choose to articulate our fears, that gentle sense of anxiety is something we all have in common. We can circle it when banter slows because we’ve all been kicked or walloped at one time or another, and I agree that it’s a special kind of pain which, as a silver lining, offers a universal “out” from failing conversations.

But my objection to this cutting is not that I can imagine the razor blade coming for me. Now the vet has been for those bulls and gone again, I can say that I object to the experience for its sudden smell of warm fat and the slap of discarded organs falling slipshod into the mud. That’s “not very nice”, but neverendingly worse because the stuff comes out of a creature that lives on blinking, with its slackly knotted strings tugged up from between its legs like pasta. And holding it still for the cutting, I pressed my leg into the belly of a soon-to-be steer and felt that pipework come undone across my knee like a thread pulled from a sheet of fabric. I’m not troubled by the infliction of death, or of plunging my hands to the elbow in hot and recent viscera, but it turns out that I prefer my animals to be alive or dead and not parts of both in different states diverging.

The library at school had a heavily abridged copy of James Bruce’s “Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile”. It was the gift of some Victorian benefactor, back when I thought Ex Libris was the name of the book’s first owner and the name beneath it was whoever’d had it afterwards. I don’t remember much about this book aside from a long description of Sudanese cattle herders who knew where on a cow to cut without killing it; so that each night the men could eat steaks from the living herd, and on long journeys sustain themselves with a packed lunch that carried itself. That’s pragmatism taken to a rare degree, and it’s no surprise it’s stayed with me for twenty five years.

And looking at my cattle now, I must admit I cannot tell which of those steers did better – the tiny bull calves banded at three days old or those left to be cut after the thick end of a year. The difference is hardly noticeable, and perhaps I should’ve left them longer to try it properly. Either way, I’m not sure the test is worth the smell, and that’s before I’ve seen the bill.