The Secret Life of Cows; The Cow Book: A Story of Life on a Family Farm

Two writers with hands-on experience explore the changing relationship between human beings and farm animals.

Cows increasingly are denied the opportunity to bond with their calves.

Domesticated livestock, which make up about 60 per cent of the planet’s mammal biomass, are so ubiquitous as to be invisible (and in the case of industrial farming — feedlots and abattoirs — literally so). Even for those of us who live in cities, cattle, sheep, pigs and poultry are the prosaic paddock fixtures we drive past on the way to visit more elusive or charismatic wild creatures in the bush.

Most will be familiar with the substantial ­library of texts — Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk is the most visible recent success — that deal with wild creatures and our human ­attempts to know or interact with them.

These books tend to explore the radical other­ness of untamed animals and acknow­ledge their indifference to our presumption of species dominance. In doing so they teach us something about our place in the web of life. They are a kind of treaty made with wildness: an acceptance of, and an expression of respect for, a distinct alternative mode of being in the world.

Two other creaturely subgenres have emerged in the wake of such narratives. The first seeks to push the boundaries of sentience and make us think again about what selfhood, emotion, culture or communication might mean in relation to the plant kingdom. Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees is a good example. The other tries to renegotiate our sense of the creatures closest to us: domestic animals kept as pets, for example. And then there is the agricultural livestock we raise for food.

Rosamund Young’s The Secret Life of Cows is well ahead of the zeitgeist: the English farmer’s eccentric slip of a book was first published in 2003 by a small press with agricultural interests. After Yorkshireman and national treasure Alan Bennett praised the book in one of his published diaries, a sharp-eyed editor at Faber worked up this new edition, published with an introduction by Bennett.

However repackaged, it is a timeless invocation of life on a Cotswolds farm. This is in part because, when Young’s parents began farming in 1953 (only days after she was born), they were adamant that the aspects of agriculture then being shifted to industrial methods should be preserved, at least on their modest patch.

Kite’s Nest Farm has been wholly organic since 1980 and its herd of heritage cattle is fed on meadows of the kind Laurie Lee, just down the road near the village of Slad, described in Cider with Rosie, evoking an earlier England: ‘‘We carried cut hay from the heart of the rick, packed tight as tobacco flake, with grass and wild flowers juicily fossilised within — a whole summer embalmed in our arms.’’

The Secret Life of Cows, by Rosamund Young.

The nods to continuities with pre-industrial agriculture are mainly in passing, however: Young is obsessively, even dottily, concerned with her mixed-breed beef herd (with occas­ional digressions into the world of pigs, sheep and poultry). Consisting of a series of brief anecdotes, the book fleshes out field observations made by Young and others across half a century concerning the nature and surprising richness of bovine behaviour and presence.

Her arguments, bolstered by this direct experience, suggest that cattle have personalities and memories, can grieve and form friendship bonds, and have their own means of inter-­species communication when required. This also goes, in slightly different ways, for sheep, pigs and chickens.

This results in a sometimes odd reading experience. Each paragraph bristles with bovine genealogies (the present herd at Kite’s is effect­ively closed: they haven’t brought in a new ­female in decades) that reach back into the dimness of time. It is a bit like getting lost in the entry of some obscure county family in Burke’s Landed Gentry:

Old Fat Hat’s first daughter was called Bonnet and Bonnet produced eleven calves of whom Roan Bonnet, Little Bonnet, Peter Bonnetti, and Gold Bonnet are notable. Roan Bonnet’s first calf was called the Bishop of Durham.

It is worth looking beyond the inadvertent comedy of anthropomorphism at work, however, and attending instead to Young’s central thesis, which is profound and disturbing:

Success in farming is increasingly measured in terms of output … However, what is not taken into account is the fact that the almost constantly pregnant mother may well have a reduced life-span and will not have the opportunity to pass on to her progeny her own accumulated wisdom because of unnatural, forced weaning strategies.

‘‘This,’’ she concludes, ‘‘increases the chances that future generations will be less know­ledgeable and less well equipped to deal with maturity or motherhood themselves. This is farming for the short term.’’

If it is true that what has allowed the transmission of human culture over three or more generations is a degree of longevity, family bonds and associated structures of community, then what Young is saying is this: we are giving the overwhelming preponderance of fellow creatures on Earth lives so nasty, brutish and short that they cannot do something comparable. We make livestock dumb and damage them bodily. We gather them in herds so large that any potential for individuality is lost. And we raise them, for the most part, under industrial conditions so alien to traditional modes of creaturely existence that they have no means of expressing themselves.

Having created these stunted creatures — and the literature of the 20th-century concentration camp shows that humans can also be ­reduced to the status of mere things — we use their denuded condition to justify their ­ongoing exploitation on a scale unimaginable to traditional farmers. No wonder we don’t like to look at them too closely.

This wounding percipience is expanded on in John Connell’s memoir of small-farm life (a work that, neatly enough, bears an approving blurb from Rosamund Young).

Irish writer and cow farmer John Connell. Picture: Eamonn Doyle

The Cow Book tracks a year spent by Connell working on his family’s smallholding in ­Ireland’s County Longford. The voice here is far less cluttered and infatuated — it unfolds in a deceptively simple, lilting prose — but it is also the that of a less experienced farmer. It is a narrative in which we can see the formation of a mature sensibility as it meets the obligations, the trials and tribulations, of rural life.

Connell is 29 when he returns to the family farm, back from a decade overseas, much of it spent studying and working in Australia as a journalist. His first novel, The Ghost Estate, about the aftermath of the collapse of the tiger economy in Ireland, was published in 2016.

There are hints of romantic failure and exhaustion that have led him home, to a father with whom he quarrels and to a community still sunk in old ways of being and doing.

The work is demanding and, for someone who has made a place in the wider world, sometimes galling for the author.

But there is, for want of a better word, ­dignity in his difficult and round-the-clock ­labour, as well as a chance to reframe his life in ways that are less distracting or debilitating.

First goes the iPhone addiction, then the weekend trips to Dublin to socialise with friends begin to pall. What replaces them is a renewed sense of personal responsibility and a subtler evaluation of values:

I am getting out of the habit of technology now, and there is freedom in the absence of it. Perhaps Birchview is my Walden. I have felt that it is only in the last year that I have finally begun to live.

These bromides are cancelled by a series of plain descriptions of what it is like to live as a farmer. There is a special kind of grind that comes from animal husbandry. Calving or lambing does not occur only between the hours of 9 to 5; Connell is obliged at times to sleep in his work clothes.

There is futile work, such as the cutting down of trees that the household cannot burn for fuel because the house is now oil-heated. There is the tragic work involved with the ­disposal of animals killed by disease or wild dogs, an undoing of labour that becomes a ­labour in itself.

Connell describes weariness and domestic discord, since all decisions on the farms may be contested by parents, children, siblings. There is no great profit to be wrung from it, either: Connell is working for room and board while he writes his next book.

The Cow Book, by John Connell.

Nonetheless: there is a rhythm to his work; a daily cadence. It starts to sing for him. Despite the lack of progress in his writing, a mounting sense of satisfaction is described. After years of desk toil, the kind in which the self must be tested in relation to other ambitious selves, and success defined in purely individualistic terms, Connell finds peace in elevating the needs of those whose lives are shaped by his care above his own human needs. What he outlines is a huge displacement of ego, coupled with a growing happiness and vigour.

Of course, it is cattle that remain central to the narrative. Connell intersperses his journal with a potted cultural history of human-cow ­relationships, from the ancient, extinct aurochs depicted on the walls of the caves at Lascaux, to the scour-suffering calves over-wintering in his farm shed. The links he uncovers between our two species are of great antiquity and utterly central to human success (at least in Europe and the Indian subcontinent, where our bodies adapted to thrive on milk).

Connell wonders at one point about the ­history and significance of the Greek myth of the Minotaur: that half-bull, half-human who required regular human sacrifices. He sees the story in its historical context but wonders if there isn’t another layer beneath it. To what ­degree, this limpid, sad, often moving book asks, do our animal destinies still conjoin? Our relationship with cattle made us as a civilisation, he continues. Hence the reverence in which human culture has held them for so long.

The thought that necessarily follows, having read these twinned accounts, is what happens when that sense of balance, of care, of inter­connection, breaks down? Will it be what ­always happens in Greek myth, when hubris comes to the fore? We will find out soon.

Geordie Williamson is chief literary critic of The Australian. He recently moved to a small farm in Tasmania, where he raises pigs, cattle and poultry.

The Secret Life of Cows

By Rosamund Young. Introduction by Alan Bennett

Faber, 128pp, $19.99 (HB)

The Cow Book: A Story of Life on a Family Farm

By John Connell

Granta, 288pp, $29.99