Bog Myrtle & Peat

The calf was blind in one eye, and there was something wrong with its neck. It didn’t stand well, and it would often fall when I pressed it to walk. I’m certain now that it was damaged by listeriosis in the mother, but I didn’t know that when I began to work upon it.

I’ve had weak calves before, and I’ve recovered one or two with a level of patience and perseverance that doesn’t come naturally to me. But sometimes this works easily, and I’ve been able to manoeuvre calves onto their mother’s teats with very little effort. At other times, I’ve found myself doomed for days, putting the teat in a new calf’s mouth and actually spraying milk down its throat by hand. It’s exhausting, particularly since calves do best when they’re fed little and often. So the day begins at five with the first small suck, and then another every two hours until midnight, when, at this time of year, the summer sun dips briefly beneath the horizon for less time than it takes to make a coffee.

If you commit to the job, you can lose yourself inside it – and while there’s hope, that’s acceptable. But you never can foresee the outcome, and it’s hard to know if or when the natural mechanism will suddenly click into place and the calf will begin to take care of itself. I’ve had calves which called for an extensive programme of support and later went on to be utterly fine. But I’ve also had calves which never became cows, no matter how hard I worked. You can keep them alive for weeks by teeming milk into their guts, but you can’t sustain life without momentum; growth and progress work like a slingshot, and if you can build sufficient natural impetus, a calf will go from strength to strength. If you can’t, the animal remains in stasis, vulnerable to a growing list of secondary ailments. At some point along this line, you have to cut your losses and accept that it’s a bad job, so you reach for the gun and send the remains away on the lorry. 

And that turning point interests me, because none of these weak-minded calves will ever repay the work that goes into them. In fact, the margins are so tight in this game that if anything goes wrong with a beast in the course of eighteen months from calving to sale, my profit’s gone. If I was to include my time in the final bill, a calf which ailed in the first few days of its life would never recover the cost of itself. So lacking any financial explanation for this angst, I realise it’s not entirely about the money. Freed from that single-minded focus on the bottom line, the turning point to quit or continue becomes surprisingly fluid. It’s based on personal judgement and a desire to do your best by the animals in your care. I understand why commercially minded farmers would make faster decisions, but I refuse to normalise that approach because there are moral imperatives in this business – moral imperatives, and an additional code of obligation while lies beneath simple economics. 

I’ve been hardwired to abhor wastefulness, and what is a calf if not a chance to begin something new? In every sphere of this life, I’m being trained to reuse, patch-up and restore to a level that would appal modernity, and a cow means more than just a revenue stream at eighteen months old. They are complete beings, and creatures upon which human life has been based for thousands of years. Even in the age of supermarkets and burger king, there are strains of enduring respect for these animals. They’re there to be used in ways which make a bottom line seem silly, and if financial determiners have gained a singular ascendancy in modern agriculture, they do not not precisely overlay the full potential of a cow.

It’s true that cattle can be traded for money to buy things we require, but how often do farmers sell cows and use the income to buy things they already had; milk, beef and leather? As well as providing nutrition and sustenance, cows provide us with a sense of purpose and satisfaction in a job which has obvious beginnings, middles and ends. I understand that it’s so inconvenient to kill or cure your own requirements that nobody does it, but it would be a mistake to delete that direct connection with livestock – not least because inconvenience is often a useful way to counteract a sense of personal self-importance. Of course it would be unreasonable for me to argue that every person should rear and produce beef for their own consumption. That would be crazy, but it is useful to remember that cows had value long before there was money, and links which arise from that old relationship manifest themselves in a way that cash can’t always explain. I’m sometimes dismissed as a “hobby farmer” because my livestock represents more than mere money. I could easily turn that criticism round and complain that in the long history of husbandry, farmers who are motivated solely by financial gain are newcomers. So if I sometimes do “too much” to save an ailing calf, there are cultural precedents which explain my determination to persist.

I wrote all of the above when that calf’s story was unfinished, but I have a conclusion now. Despite early signs of progress, I found it lying dead in the dark two nights later. It had been cooling even as I had warmed a pan of milk to feed it, so I put my rubber-titted bottle on the ground and sat nearby as its mother licked the little white corpse and threatened me for being too near. Listeriosis exists in many shades, and while I’ve since learned that this calf was always doomed to die, I didn’t know it at the time. I saw it as a personal failure, and a waste of something far larger than the inventory of its saleable parts. Twelve hours later beneath the glare of a hot sun, my neighbour leant across the fence and consoled me by saying that at least I hadn’t called the vet – I should be glad of the money I saved.