Bog Myrtle & Peat

People are surprised by the wisdom and memory of cows. Perhaps they expect such large, unwieldy animals to be slow or blandly-minded, and it’s true that linguistic expressions of intelligence are few and far between. If you’re unused to hearing it, the flat and monotonous “moo” sounds like a lack of insight; the full diversity of unmet need expressed with the same thoughtless blast of a trumpet. The reality is that cows feel deeply, and recollections endure for many years. The silly “moo” is more complex than it seems, and we judge them for it because we’re so used to speaking in long and winding phrases. But once your ear has been tuned, you start to realise that bulls will scream, cows can moan and calves bark in moments of panic. And besides, most of their communication is made through gesture and expression. 

Humans are attuned to give and receive attention, and to recognise when it’s our turn to talk. Gestures work differently for animals, and cows have a far more three dimensional ability to gather information from their surroundings. So when a bullock turns his ears back against his neck and lowers his head at angle, he might be saying “I’m irritated”, or “keep back”. The animals around him see the sign and take a bearing from it without any need to confirm receipt. The bullock doesn’t have to go around the herd afterwards tapping each of his peers on the shoulder and asking if they’ve seen what he did – it’s a constant silent dialogue, and an enormous amount of information is exchanged between contented cattle which almost never moo. 

In September each year, my neighbours separate the year’s calves from their mothers. They’ll never be reunited, and a new cohort of young animals will go off to be fattened or grown into new breeding stock. The glen rings to the sound of their mother’s distress, and calves call for their mothers for several days. It’s distressing for all parties, but it’s how commercial cattle are produced in modern systems and the animals soon settle down. I wouldn’t call it cruel or unnecessary, and it’s no brag of welfare or propriety for me to say that my calves stay with their mothers for much longer. They’re born a little later and they aren’t ready to be separated in the autumn – besides, I wouldn’t have anywhere to put them if I did take them away. So they stay on until they’re a year old and their mothers are due to give birth again. That’s when she’ll start to kick them away by her own choice, and the separation is softer and more natural. 

Commercial farming is based on batches of even-aged animals, and that’s an obvious refinement in the name of efficiency. To achieve their full potential, young animals have different needs to breeding ones, and it makes sense to keep and work them in separate groups. But through various accidents and sub-plots, it sometimes happens that my animals are kept together all their lives, or separated for six or eight months before being thrown together again. And I should not be surprised to find that when related animals are kept together, they often prefer to spend time in family groups; two or three calves of various ages and stages gravitate loosely towards their mother, even though for the older ones, the relationship is entirely functionless; there’s no milk to suck or protection sought. They just like to be around her, and heifers form little clans within the wider herd which demonstrate the existence of a long-term family bond.

You could spend time trying to identify the evolutionary advantage of staying together like this, but that would ignore the fact that we humans do it ourselves – and while almost all behaviour in the animal kingdom is geared towards survival, we rarely apply the same analytical lens to our own decision-making. When we gravitate towards our families, we aren’t consciously making choices which improve our chances of survival; the experience of love or affection exist as something beyond the mechanistic rationale which drives those feelings. We simply want to be around the people we know and care about, and models which present animal behaviour in purely systemic terms undermine the more nuanced and complicated reality.

These dynamics are hard to quantify, and when it comes to calves which are clearly bonded to their mothers, it’s more obvious in certain cases than others. But if I want to understand how it works, I know that all the evidence is there before me – the problem is that I’m a clumsy, cloth-eared human, and I haven’t learnt how to read it.

Photo: Riggit cow Barfil Aspen in a family group with her white 2022 heifer calf and her white 2023 bull calf.