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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
'Funny, insightful and hugely informative ... a charming book' DAILY MAIL 'Tremendous ... We all need to take stock, and this is the ideal starting point. I learnt a lot from this book and laughed a lot too.' ROSAMUND YOUNG, author of The Secret Life of Cows Since highland cattle ransacked his grandmother's vegetable patch when he was six, Roger Morgan-Grenville has been fascinated by cows. So at the age of 61, with no farming experience, he signed on as a part- time labourer on a beef cattle farm to tell their side of the story. The result is this lyrical and evocative book. For 10,000 years, cow and human lives have been intertwined. Cattle have existed alongside us, fed and shod us, quenched our thirst, and provided a thousand other tiny services, and yet most of us know little about them. We are also blissfully unaware of the de-natured lives we often ask them to lead. Part history, part adventure and part unsentimental manifesto for how we should treat cows in the 21st century, Taking Stock asks us to think carefully about what we eat, and to let nature back into food production.
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i
Praise for Taking Stock
‘Tremendous … We all need to take stock, and this is the ideal starting point. I learnt a lot from this book and laughed a lot too.’
Rosamund Young, author of The Secret Life of Cows
‘No cow could ever hope for a better appreciation of its truly unique worth.’
Betty Fussell, author of Eat, Live, Love, Die and Raising Steaks: The Life and Times of American Beef
‘An epic story told with warmth, wit and humanity. Will make us feel differently about these long-suffering animals.’
Graham Harvey, author of Grass-Fed Nation
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Praise for Liquid Gold
‘A great book. Painstakingly researched, but humorous, sensitive and full of wisdom. I’m on the verge of getting some bees as a consequence of reading the book.’
Chris Stewart, author of Driving Over Lemons
‘A light-hearted account of midlife, a yearning for adventure, the plight of bees, the quest for “liquid gold” and, above all, friendship.’
Sunday Telegraph
‘Liquid Gold is a book that ignites joy and warmth through a layered and honest appraisal of bee-keeping. Roger Morgan-Grenville deftly brings to the fore the fascinating life of bees but he also presents in touching and amusing anecdotes the mind-bending complexities and frustrations of getting honey from them. But like any well-told story from time immemorial, he weaves throughout a silken thread, a personal narrative that is at once self-effacing, honest and very human. In this book you will not only meet the wonder of bees but the human behind the words.’
Mary Colwell, author of Curlew Moon
‘Beekeeping builds from lark to revelation in this carefully observed story of midlife friendship. Filled with humour and surprising insight, Liquid Gold is as richly rewarding as its namesake. Highly recommended.’
Thor Hanson, author of Buzz: The Nature and Necessity of Bees
‘Behind the self-deprecating humour, Morgan-Grenville’s childlike passion for beekeeping lights up every page. His bees are a conduit to a connection with nature that lends fresh meaning to his life. His bee-keeping, meanwhile, proves both a means of iiiescape from the grim state of the world and a positive way of doing something about it. We could probably all do with some of that.’
Dixe Wills,BBC Countryfile magazine
‘Peppered with fascinating facts about bees, Liquid Gold is a compelling and entertaining insight into the life of the beekeeper. But it’s much more than that. It’s the story of a life at a crossroads when a series of random events sets the author off on a different, and more satisfying, path. It’s a tale of friendship and fulfilment, stings and setbacks, successes and failures and finding meaning in midlife.’
WI Life
‘[A] delightfully told story … Wryly humorous with fascinating facts about bees, it charts the author’s own mid-life story and the joys of making discoveries.’
Choice magazine
‘The reader will learn plenty about bees and beekeeping from this book, although it is about as far from a manual as possible. Liquid Gold is a well observed delve into the hobbyist’s desire to find what is important in life, no matter their age or preparedness.’
The Irish News
‘[A] delightful exploration of the world of bees and their honey … a hymn to the life-enhancing connection with the natural world that helped Morgan-Grenville reconcile himself to the fading of the light that is middle age.’
Country & Town House magazine
‘Both humorous and emotionally affecting … Morgan-Grenville’s wry and thoughtful tale demonstrates why an item many take for granted should, in fact, be regarded as liquid gold.’
Publishers Weekly
iv
Praise for Shearwater
‘This charming and impassioned book meanders, shearwater-like, across a lifetime and a world, a rich tribute to an extraordinary bird drawn through tender memoir and dauntless travel.’
Horatio Clare, author of A Single Swallow and Heavy Light
‘Shearwater is sheer delight, a luminous portrait of a magical seabird which spans the watery globe’
Daily Mail
‘This is wonderful: written with light and love. A tonic for these times.’
Stephen Rutt, author of The Seafarers: A Journey Among Birds
‘What I love about Roger Morgan-Grenville’s writing is the sheer humanness of it … There are environmental issues and pure natural history in here, but the overall feel of the book is simple, humble wonder. Roger was lucky to have a grandmother who knew how to gently foster a live-wire mind. She loved birds, she loved Roger, and the combination guided him to her way of thinking as he grew older – and this odyssey for shearwaters is the result. Bravo – a truly lovely book.’
Mary Colwell, author of Curlew Moon
‘Shearwater is a delightful and informative account of a lifelong passion for seabirds, as the author travels around the globe in pursuit of these enigmatic creatures.’
Stephen Moss, naturalist and author of The Swallow: A Biographyv
‘A memoir lit by wry humour and vivid prose … his evocation of the Hebrides is as true as the fresh-caught mackerel fried in oatmeal his grandmother used to cook for him.’
Brian Jackman, author of Wild About Britain
‘This is a book that birders will enjoy because it is stitched together around a fairly amazing bird, but if you’ve never heard of shearwaters you will still get a lot out of this book if you are interested in nature, in adventures, in foreign parts, in landscapes or in people … a very good read.’
Mark Avery
‘A great read’
birdwatching.co.uk
‘[A] lovely blend of natural history and memoir … Morgan-Grenville beautifully blends science, memories, and wonder in this striking homage to an amazing bird.’
Booklist
‘A captivating mix of memoir, travel and ornithological obsession … A book not just for seabirders or island-addicts, but for all who have ever gazed longingly out to sea and pondered vast possibilities and connections.’
BBC Wildlife magazine
‘Morgan-Grenville is a delightful writer … his writerly tone here is perfect: serious, but not hysterical or preachy, with a gleam of hope evident.’
10,000birds.com
‘A beautiful mix of memoir and natural history … entirely infectious.’
Scottish Field
ix
Taking Stock
A Journey Among Cows
Roger Morgan-Grenville
CONTENTS
DEDICATION
This book is dedicated to every livestock farmer in the world who puts excellence ahead of speed, welfare ahead of profit and biodiversity ahead of tidiness.
And, particularly, to John and Emma who patiently walked me through their world for the best part of eighteen months, and still gave me digestive biscuits every time I turned up.
GRATITUDE
There is a long list of acknowledgements at the back of the book, but I am obviously profoundly grateful to Caroline, Tom and Alex for their patience, encouragement and love while I was writing it.xvi
PROLOGUE
The Everywhere Cow
The Market Cross, Chichester
‘God does not play dice’
Albert Einstein
Come in from the fields for a time. Our modern cow story begins right in the heart of a busy city.
By the market cross a teenage boy polishes off his burger, before putting the packaging in a bin and carefully wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his sweatshirt before sauntering happily away towards the cathedral.
A few yards from him, a small group of girls sit on the stone bench and, draining off their fruit smoothies, they laugh at a limping seagull.
Nearby, turning right out of West Street and into South Street, a bus passes, its hissing air-brakes momentarily masking the sound of its tyres running across the urban tarmac.
Just behind them, the safety company is doing its annual inspection of the fire extinguishers in the Dolphin and Anchor, just as the barman removes the drying towels from the handles xviiion the pumps in preparation for what he hopes will be the evening rush.
A few yards into East Street, an undergraduate removes his £30 from the tray of the cashpoint at Barclays, the light catching briefly on his glasses as he turns into the sunshine to walk back to his flat to complete his overdue essay on feedback loops.
You might not think so, but cows are virtually everywhere, even in those tyres, that tarmac, that cash, those glasses, that fire extinguisher. If the evening rush in that pub creates hangovers, then it is even highly likely that a cow will be involved in the cure.
Vanishingly little that you do with your life, or buy, or use, or move around in, doesn’t have a cow involved at some point, often many points.
Halfway through a quiet Thursday afternoon in the little cathedral city of Chichester, the unseen signature of the cow is everywhere, as it is in every village, town and city in the country.
You will find it in every aisle of the supermarket: on the meat counter and the dairy section, of course, in the tempting artisan Brie and the tasteless processed slices of factory cheese. It is present in the chewing gum in the dispenser by the checkout, in the powdered supplements and the packaging of the unappetising curry meal for two. The clean shirt that you put on to go shopping went through a pre-wash that was assisted by a cow, and the granite sideboard you picked it up from this morning was clean partly because a cow was involved in the cleaning agent. xix
If you stopped to count the number of times it appears in the pharmacy in East Street, you would be there for hours, days perhaps: shaving cream, lipstick, soap, sunscreens, dental floss, shampoos, cough syrups, bubble baths and moisturising creams would simply be the tip of a vast iceberg of bovine derivatives that have worked their way into the supply chain.
In the sweet shop, it’s the gum in those chewy sweets, the nougat, the marshmallows and the little white bits in some of those chocolate chip cookies. It’s in the sophisticated scented candles of the gift shop next door, and the soles and uppers of the beautiful Italian shoes that are reduced from £140 to £90 in the shoe shop just up from the jewellers.
Down in the garden centre, you will find it in the fertiliser, manure and bonemeal, and much else besides; it’s in your left hand when you take out your wallet, and your right when you pay for your purchases with that £20 note. As you head across the ring road to the DIY store, it’ll be waiting for you in the plywood adhesives, the rust inhibitors, the greases, the lubricants.
If you walk far enough down North Street, you can just about make out the roofs of St Richard’s Hospital. Every department there relies, to some extent, on a by-product of a cow, whether it is heparin in the anticoagulants used to treat post-operative patients, the adrenal glands in the steroids that are prescribed, or the tiny quantities of pancreas within the insulin given to diabetics. Anti-adhesion bandages, injectable collagen, tissue sealants – even in the treatment of varicose veins, a tiny bit of the cow will be there to help you out when you need it. She is, indeed, an animal of gifts. xx
Even the fact that you don’t have, and never will have, smallpox – a disease, let’s not forget, that killed around 30% of everyone who caught it – is basically down to a cow called Blossom. After all, where do you think the word ‘vaccine’ came from?*
Ten thousand years after Neolithic man first domesticated cattle, and whether we know it or not, the cow is almost as tightly woven into our daily lives as the air that we breathe: one billion of them,† one for every seven and a half of us, and they are in every country of the world except Greenland and The Vatican. You will find them grazing just about everywhere, from the beautiful pastures of the Sussex Weald to the dusty plains of Ethiopia, and from the forest clearings in Borneo to the windswept prairies of Canada. A third of all the cows on earth live in India, which comes as a surprise to some, and you can make that into a half if you add Brazil, neither of them countries you would naturally associate with ideal grazing conditions.1 Rather less than 1% of them live in Britain, even though it has some of the most reliable rain, and best grassland on earth.
In support of our species, and for millennia, cattle have also carried loads for us, pulled our carts and dragged our ploughs. They have been asked to go to war with us, and to xxifight, and charge and buck for our entertainment. Often, they have provided rudimentary central heating to families deliberately choosing to live above the rising heat from their bodies. Many of our words for money and property, pecuniary and chattel, for example, are derived from the cow’s status as a signal of wealth, even transferable wealth. They are venerated in Hinduism, Jainism and Zoroastrianism, have played walk-on parts in many other religions, and are seen as a measure of wealth by cultures like the Kenyan Maasai and the Mundari in South Sudan. We even send them as gifts.
But here’s the rub.
They may be ten times as much practical help to us as other, more feted, domesticated animals, but their lot instead is to be frequently mocked rather than respected. After all, no one ever called a cow ‘man’s best friend’, or used the term as a compliment. In the pecking order of our respect for domesticated animals, the cow is probably in fourth place after the dog, horse and cat, and just above sheep, goat and chicken. In the last 100 years, the average productivity of a cow has doubled, while its average life expectancy has halved, which is good if you are a shareholder of a soya shipping business in Brazil, less so if you are called Daisy and just want to live out in the meadow.
We worry about the methane from their wind, even though there were probably greater numbers of large ruminants burping their way around the countryside three centuries ago than there are cattle now; we read reports about slurry pits leaching into watercourses, and we note with alarm the huge distances that cattle feed has to travel these days to reach them, and the xxiirainforests that are cleared for their grazing, or for crops that they will consume thousands of miles away. The cow has become the unwitting battleground over which we fight our battles on diet, lifestyle, biodiversity loss, land and water use, and animal ethics. At the same time, for all that they give us – and it is a great deal – we ask very many of them to lead lives of indentured slavery in grassless, sunless sheds and joyless barns. Evolved to graze the grasslands, summer and winter, many of them instead lead entirely indoor lives, and are then blamed for the fossil fuel emissions that result from a global supply chain that is bringing largely unsuitable food substitutes halfway across the world to grow them faster than mere biology could.
Let’s not conveniently invent a mythical past when the grass was greener, the world kinder and everything for the cow was perfect, but something significant seems to have happened in the last half century or so, something that has created a giant one-way gap of understanding between people and cattle. It is as if we have stopped making any serious connection between the beast grazing in the field and the milk we drink, the beef we eat, let alone the shoes we wear. Maybe it is a conscious distancing from a concept (in this case the inevitable death that precedes meat) that makes us feel uncomfortable; maybe our busy lives are just too full of gifts already to remember that the cow should rightfully be considered one of them. Or maybe, when we first wandered off into the towns and cities and left our cattle behind in their pastures out beyond the ring road, we left our manners on the grass right there with them, the deadlines and challenges of our utterly connected urban lives just leaving no space for a creature we’d rather not know too much xxiiiabout. When our own species slaughters 34,000 of theirs each hour,2 you might start to think that this is a strange oversight.
In a part of the world where we pay around half the relative amount on food that we did 30 years ago, and where that food travels ever further, and from ever more industrial processes to be on our plates, it is hardly surprising that we have become disconnected from its origins. At a time when around 11% of our planet’s 7.7 billion people go hungry,3 and yet over twice that amount are overweight or obese,4 it should not come as a shock to us that we have persuaded ourselves that food is an issue for people brighter than us, no more than one of the routine obligations of the busy day, and not the still point of our turning world that it arguably should be. As the argument rages, it is quite easy to overlook that the British Isles is probably the most suitable place on earth to raise cattle, in terms of its grass-friendly climate and geology, its plentiful water supply and its relative soil equilibrium. But, with a world expected to double its demand for meat over the first half of this century,5 not even the most committed steak eater can pretend that things don’t need to change.
We live in the most de-natured corner of a determinedly de‑natured world, within which the cow finds itself marked up as biodiversity villain rather than the ecosystem engineer it should be. For some reason, farming bores us. After all, agriculture these days accounts for under 1% of Britain’s GDP, and we are paying fifteen times the annual budget of our farming and countryside ministry (Defra‡) just on a little-wanted railway xxivline upgrade from London to Birmingham.6 Back in 1925, there were over a million agricultural workers against a sixth of that now,7 so the chances of you knowing and understanding someone who works on the land are vastly reduced. When a senior Treasury adviser argues in his bizarre submission to the National Food Strategy that ‘Britain doesn’t need farmers’ and that the food sector ‘isn’t critically important to the UK’,8 you can start to understand the issue, if not the solution. Unlike most countries, we are a pliant people of almost limitless faith who have been happy to entrust 90% of our food supply into just eight boardrooms,9 so you could be forgiven for thinking that we don’t really care – certainly not about having any semblance of control.
Then again, when the Oxford Junior Dictionary disposes of words like acorn, buttercup and crocus in favour of analogue, broadband and chatroom, it is perhaps understandable that our children grow up to replace cow with curry. The human race tends to comply with Gilbert’s theory of belief, a crude version of which is that we come to accept as true what we are most repeatedly told, whatever the evidence against it might be.10 And like all modern consumers, we generally like to blame everyone but ourselves for the consequences of the decisions we make on our weekly shopping trips. One of the questions which this book examines is what we have been told about cows over the last few years, and what we have therefore ended up believing. Some of it is right, some nearly right, and some plain wrong. Very little of it does the cow any favours.
That cow grazing quietly on that little bit of pasture just xxvoutside town§ is a sophisticated, intelligent and highly social animal that has unwittingly done more than just about any other creature to help man in his relentless climb to the top. As John Connell points out: ‘It is we who brought them from the wilderness to join our family and walk by our side.’11 From continent to continent and century to century, for 10,000 years, they have trotted compliantly behind us wherever we go. It’s time we celebrated them. There has never been a better time to remind ourselves of their contribution, past and present, and of our responsibility to work out a good future for them.
You might call this their side of the story.
Notes
1.www.beef2live.com
2.Cow Care in Hindu Animal Ethics, Kenneth Valpey, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.
3.www.worldhunger.org, 2016.
4. World Health Organization (WHO) Fact Sheet.
5. ‘Cooking up a Storm: Food, greenhouse gas emissions and our changing climate’, Tara Garnett, Food Climate Research Network, 2008.
6.Green and Prosperous Land, Dieter Helm, Collins, 2019.
7. Office for National Statistics.
8. Dr Tim Leunig, London School of Economics, Adviser to Departments of Education and Environment, February 2020.
9.Feeding Britain, Tim Lang, Pelican, 2021.
10. ‘How Mental Systems Believe’, Daniel T. Gilbert, University of Texas paper, 1991.
11.The Cow Book, John Connell, Granta, 2016.
* From vacca, the Latin for cow, because of the early use of the cowpox virus in the treatment of its much nastier cousin, smallpox.
† 987,510,000, to be exact (Statista, 2020). But you will find any figure between that and 1.5 billion, depending on where you look. For consistency, I have used the Statista figure throughout.
‡ Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
§ Or inside the city limits, in the case of Cambridge, where traditional breeds such as Longhorn, Red Poll and Hereford have been grazing the city’s green spaces for centuries, saving the authorities a fortune in mowing bills, conditioning the soil, and making tourists happy. It is a service known as ‘pinder’. xxvi
PART 1
Then
2
1. A PREHISTORIC JOURNEY
3.5 billion years ago–20,000 BCE
‘The chicken is only an egg’s way of making another egg’
Richard Dawkins
I am not a farmer. I just happen to like cows. They press a button in my soul that other, perhaps better regarded animals simply don’t.
My sole contribution to agriculture until recently was the one late, scorched summer in 1976 that I spent doing bale-cart for Jim Bennett on his mixed farm down the road from us in the Rother Valley. Looking back at it, Jim paid me, quite literally, pence,* but he treated me well and, most important, he allowed 4me to drive the old red Massey Ferguson tractor with its articulated snake of trailers behind it. As a spotty teenager who was an angry confusion of odd attitudes, being paid anything at all to drive around our local lanes towing the winter’s hay back to the barn was a glimpse over the wall into the secret garden, and I would probably have done it for free, if he’d asked me to. In a quiet village where I sometimes felt that I amounted to little more than being my father’s son, this was a short-term leasehold on manhood. I often took the long route home just on the off-chance of being seen by more people, especially if they included my parents. To be in charge of anything, let alone an agricultural machine of fully 39 horsepower, showed that I had achieved something, and that my playing days were over. More importantly, the cash enabled me to park for a time the rather perilous income stream that flowed from my having spent that summer furtively selling the koi carp from my parents’ fish pond while they weren’t looking, to people I fondly hoped they would never meet.†
In those days, working on the land was the only possibility in our valley in terms of holiday jobs, and the only casual work that was generally available was seasonal fruit and vegetable picking: strawberries (before the strawberry field was turned into a house and garden), apples (before the trees were grubbed up too, to make way for new homes), and back-breaking Brussels sprouts on the coastal plains in the January 5frost. Nothing that I experienced in nine subsequent years of serving in the Army all over the world came close, in toughness, to my routine 30-mile round trip through the dark and freezing fog on an underpowered motorbike, sandwiching eight hours of leaning over sodden yet frosted sprout plants, being paid piece rate in competition with scarily robust women who had done it all their lives, and who made it abundantly clear that I was an idiot, and in the way.
Everything else has gone, but 40 years on, those wretched sprouts are still grown in the same bloody field. To this day, a shard of misery enters my body whenever I see a Brussels sprout.
I think my first awareness of cows was triggered by the tiny plastic black and white ones which populated the fields of My Little Town, a primitive German set of wooden houses, combined with Dinky cars that were five times the size of the livestock, in all of whose company I would pass hour after aimless hour once my older sister had gone off to primary school and I was waiting for her to return. My first sustained experience of cows, however, came during our holidays at my grandmother’s Hebridean croft, with the docile and shaggy Highland cattle that wandered right up to the dry stone walls of her garden, and sometimes, to her fury, right through them and on into her vegetable patch. To an impressionable boy who had not yet learned what he liked in life, let alone what he actually wanted to do with the years ahead of him, those Highland cattle were a compelling metaphor for a wildness and solidity that I missed down south, but which nonetheless filled me with happiness and excitement. 6
Bit by bit, and breed by breed, cows became an enduring fascination for me. Also, as a boy who enjoyed making lists, I found that I could add different breeds of cow to the rich diversity of things that I already counted up in my little notebooks: birds, planes, trains and castles, for a start. I must have been an irritating passenger in the family car as we drove around Europe on our holidays, shouting out ‘Charolais’ or ‘Évolène’ every time we drove past a field.
‘It will pass,’ said my mother. But it didn’t.
Evolution is, of course, not a planned journey with a clear direction of travel, but a gradual change in characteristics from one generation to the next brought about by the innate need to maximise the chances for subsequent generations, and the connection between a simple, ancient bacterium and our modern cow is a long and tortuous one. For the first three billion years or so, it is also extremely boring, as the bacteria bit lasts a lot longer than we might like it to.
The potted history of bovine evolution begins in earnest a quarter of a billion years ago, when the cow’s ancestors, along with those of all other mammals including humans, were cynodonts, ‘advanced mammal-like reptiles of the middle and late Triassic that were dog-like predators’,1 rather than the dinosaurs that we would secretly like them to have been. So let’s say that we need to go back around 300 million years to when we and cows shared common ancestors. It was a time when the world was covered by warm, shallow seas, and the climate was generally humid and mostly unchanging from season to 7season. Gradually, changes in jaw structure and function led to differentiations in what these creatures went on to become, changes that we can at least keep track of, since bones, unlike skin and hair, fossilise. By 50 million years ago, the cow’s ancestors had become Artiodactyla, animals with short legs and a set of teeth that suggests that they lived on herbage rather than meat. With a brain cavity that was about the size of a walnut, you can draw any unkind conclusions you choose about their mental capacities.
If their minuscule brains were actively involved in anything other than eating, which on the face of it seems rather unlikely, they were probably taken up in trying to avoid becoming a meal for one of the resident predators of the time. And as that time went by, they divided and sub-divided, first into camels and ruminants, and then further into deer, giraffe and bovines. But we can guess with some assurance that they left behind a genetic trail that led inexorably to the ruminants.
The first recognisable ruminants probably evolved around 50 million years ago and lived in forests. They would have been much smaller than the modern cow, and most likely omnivorous, ‘not unlike the primitive chevrotain, a type of small deer known as the mouse-deer, which still inhabits the rainforests of Malaysia’.2 It would have been at this point that they developed the two-way digestive system that allowed recently eaten food to come back up for a second go in the mouth, before going back down into the ‘fermentation vat’ below. This chewing of the cud has defined ruminants ever since, and is what uniquely allows them, but not competitors, to feed off what a fifth of the world is carpeted with, namely grass. It almost certainly 8evolved to allow what was a prey animal to graze swiftly in the relative danger of the forest clearings, and then get back to the safety of the deep forest to process the food at its leisure. Indeed, it is sometimes easy to overlook that these were once forest animals.
Around 750,000 years ago, one branch of the cynodont’s descendants evolved into what we now know as the aurochs, ancestor of all our cattle, and a herbivore that we would probably recognise today. It originated in what is now India, and its fossilised signature appears to us tantalisingly all over the Eurasian landmass, deprived of traces of its soft tissue but still able to articulate the journey it has taken, and passing on the occasional hint of its role as an ecological engineer that will be one of the abiding themes in this story.
So with what other animals would those early ruminants have been sharing their grazing lands, say, 50,000 years ago? If we narrow our search down to the small herd of aurochs in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East from which cows most likely descended, they might have been seeing dwarf elephants no taller than a modern deer, wild horses, Merck’s rhinos and hippos ‘the size of a large pig’.3 And in the interests of avoiding becoming someone else’s meal, they would have been alert to the presence of predators such as man himself, spotted hyenas and steppe lions.4 As it worked its slow way westwards, the aurochs probably became a more and more substantial meal for a carnivore, as it grew ever larger.
From the very start, the aurochs had a use to the earth far beyond its status as the occasional meal for a predator, described nicely by its official biographer: 9
Grazing and browsing with their front end, trampling with heavy weight and sharp hooves with the middle, relieving themselves from their rear end, and at the end of their lives dying and becoming carcasses. All vitally important features for a multitude of species, from butterflies and microbes to fungi, birds, beetles, reptiles, plants and trees. Among the grass eaters, the aurochs with its great eating and cellulose-processing capacity, its herd behaviour and its abilities to reproduce, was the most important keystone species. The ecological value of bullshit has defined the natural heritage of Europe for thousands of years.5
As we shall see, in the face of great transformation and many millennia later, nothing has really changed in terms of that ecological value.
The strangest thing of all would not have been the variety of animals around the aurochs that would be unrecognisable to us today, but the speed and intensity at which they headed for extinction in the next 30 or 40 millennia – and the bigger they were, the quicker they went. As with the dinosaurs, so with the megafauna. In North America alone, it is thought that three-quarters of the continent’s large herbivores disappeared in just a 10,000-year period, around the time man was domesticating cattle elsewhere. These days, we call that period the ‘Near Time’, and we are led to believe that the rapid extinctions came about through a chance coming together of localised climate change and all the normal human-driven challenges: hunting, fires, and possibly infections.‡ (Rather pleasingly, a recent study 10has also come up with the argument that, fundamentally, the thicker your species is, the more it will thrive, on the basis that big brains need more food, which leads to lower population densities.6 Philosophically, this raises intriguing questions for the future of mankind, or it might prove that we have been thick all along, and just plain lucky.) As with the ocean-going seabirds in our current era, it turned out that man arrived, and increased, at a rate that simply didn’t allow their local competitors to adapt in time, including learning the useful and often overlooked quality of fear.
Whatever the causes of it all, the aurochs would once have been no more than a medium-sized resident of its ecosystem; by 10,000 years ago, it was one of the largest animals left in the northern hemisphere. Fast forward another hundred years or so from now, and the cow will likely be the largest animal on earth.
The inconvenient and inelegant truth is that if you were a large animal, and man didn’t have a continuous and profitable use for you, you were in all likelihood heading for extinction. Granted, if you happened to live on an inaccessible island, you would maybe have lasted a little bit longer: the Wrangel Island woolly mammoth, stranded by rising sea levels, hung on in there right up to 1500 BCE, sticking two elephantine fingers up at the problems of its tiny available gene pool.§ Other than 11that, it was fundamentally one-way traffic for between 750 and 1,000 of our biggest animal species. ‘Ours is a dwarf and remnant fauna,’ as George Monbiot puts it, ‘and, as its size and abundance decline, so do our expectations, imperceptibly eroding to match the limitations of the present.’7 As our story progresses, opinion may divide on whether the survival of cattle has always been to their benefit, but in evolutionary terms they have certainly utilised mankind just as much as we have utilised them. So it is for sheep, goats, pigs, dogs and even corn.
The wider bovine family evolved into its different types by travelling vast distances, and across land bridges, into other continental land masses. In 1879 in Altamira, Spain, a series of cave paintings of what was quite clearly a primitive cow were discovered, telling us not only that the aurochs were around a very long time ago, but that they were also clearly on man’s radar, as why else would he or she bother to engrave their likenesses onto a limestone slab all over south-west Europe? Although humans were still some time away from domesticating them, they obviously formed an important part of the fauna that they hunted. Representing in art the things that we are about to eat is one of the more esoteric of our contributions to global culture, something that resonates through the centuries into the thousands of sensually illustrated cookbooks today. From Lascaux to Lawson,¶ from longing to lust, food has happily always stirred in us some emotion deeper and more visceral than just eating the stuff.
12Between the ‘glacial maximum’ of the last Ice Age (25,000 BCE) and 10,000 BCE, it seems that a series of overlapping processes drew Palaeolithic man into the twin activities of domestication and cultivation that eventually led to what we know as agriculture and its bedfellow, settled living. Far from happening only in one place, this process was going on in at least six distinct areas, from the Yangtze Delta in China to the Mexican plains, all involving our forebears at slightly different stages of development. To get an idea of what life was like on the eve of our era as farmers, we can reasonably safely say that it was 20 degrees Celsius colder than now, with a sea level 100 feet below current levels, and that we had already developed quite sophisticated clothing, tools and art. Life also tended to be conducted in the coastal regions, where experience had suggested the prey was both more abundant and rather less likely to eat you. Pleasingly, it is also likely that we had already domesticated the wolf, and developed beer, long before the last Ice Age glaciers retreated, meaning that the practice of walking my old dog down to the pub of an evening is probably a whole lot older than I thought.
From the outset, the forerunners of cattle were herd animals, drawing life, safety and comfort from being part of a group, and exhibiting every sign of mental agony when deprived of it. Even the Great Hall at Altamira has depictions of twenty or more aurochs grazing together. This matters throughout our story. Within the herd, a prey animal doesn’t have to waste energy on being ever on the lookout for trouble and, as 19th-century anthropologist Francis Galton put it, it receives ‘a maximum security at the cost of a minimum of 13restlessness’. And with herds came the structures and hierarchies that we can still see, for example, in dairy farms today where the same dominant female leads the other cows in every day for milking.
Even though aurochs|| were widespread, it was possibly just one small population of them** in the Middle East that became the ancestors of the vast majority of domestic cattle on earth, when Neolithic man in that area started to identify the possible benefits of keeping a useful animal close and handy, particularly one that could convert one protein source that humans couldn’t deal with, grass, into two that they could, meat and milk. This was a pivotal development and we are fairly certain it took place between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago.
From this point onwards, cows were inextricably linked to mankind, whether they liked it or not.
It is late summer and I am leaning over a gate with my friend, John, staring into a field of cows, his cows.
Under the slanting rays of the evening sun, they seem to exude a sheen of well-being, and I tell him so.
‘Do you think so?’ he asks, looking happy with the compliment.
14The noise of long tongues wrapping themselves around clumps of grass and tearing them out fills the comfortable silence. Committed grazing is a noisier activity than you might think. It will take me a number of months before I work out that it is also just one stage in a natural cycle of huge and benevolent complexity. Eat, move, repeat is what most of their lives consist of. Eat, move, repeat. It’s kind of what I did as a boy.
‘What’s the key to what you do?’ I ask after a while. ‘I mean, what makes your animals special to the people who buy them?’
He thinks about it for a moment. ‘Well, I suppose that it’s to create the healthiest, best-looking, best-mannered cattle that I possibly can, and then send them off to improve the bloodline on other farms.’
‘How do you do that?’
The white on the bellies of the last of the summer’s swallows catches the horizontal sun, as they tirelessly pluck insects from the sky to sustain them on their coming flights to Africa.
‘Grass management,’ he says with a faint smile, ‘plus what’s in this book.’ He opens up a dirty old blue hardback notebook, small enough to have come out of the side pocket of his trousers, and shows it to me. Lines of handwritten numbers, names and dates fill each page, together with the sort of grubby off-green stains that you would tend to associate with a life spent among cattle. He hands it to me, and I notice that it smells of farming.
‘That’s everything I’ve done for the last ten years, I suppose. It’s a record of every calf we’ve ever reared, who the mother was, who the bull was, what date the calf was born and what 15its registered number is. Even where it eventually went,’ he adds, as I look at the lines of neat simplicity. It is a monument to a decade’s work.
‘So tell me about this one.’ I point at a nearby bull calf who has broken off from the main body of the herd and is grazing quietly near us at the gate. A large yellow tag in its right ear announces it as 1025, a number that, along with its details and a sample of its DNA, will be currently sitting in a record office somewhere up in Cumbria, along with those of the 9 million or so other cattle currently alive in Britain.
‘Him? He’s probably one of the best of this season’s lot.’ Then, without referring to his book at all, he adds: ‘That’s his mother over on the left, and you saw his father, Tiger, in the first field we went to. He was the larger of those three bulls we saw there.’
Tiger has done a good job for the farm in the short time he has been in action. Generally, calves that are sired by Tiger prove to be highly desirable. By now, 1025 is grazing his way back towards his mother, so we can only see him from the back end. When I ask John what makes a good calf, he suggests that we climb over the gate so that he can show me in person.
