Outpacing the Rain

The sun was shining. No sooner had I noted this along with my intention to walk than I saw rain on the windows on the back of the house. Not on the front. Ergo I would walk out the front door. Lest you think that I have stepped into Heinlein's (or was it Bradbury's?) fictional Doorway into Summer, let me offer an anecdote about the wisdom to be learned from cats and a reminder about geography. I once lived in a passive solar house. My cat knew where the warmth came from. When he asked to be let out the front door and it was 10 below zero and 6 inches of hard frozen snow, he quickly retrenched and went to the warm door to be let out. Alas, there is a limit to cat logic on the plains of Illinois. In the far north of Scotland, however, it can be raining in the back yard but not in the front.

So I went out the front door and up the hill to see what life was like in the hedgerows and on the pastures and to think about some of the ideas in my latest email conversation with my daughter. I think there is an article in them, but as my new pal and writing colleague said in our recent email conversation, the ideas for an article kind of swirl around for awhile before they see the light of day. And I don't know if it is the same for him but for me I usually have too many swirling and leaping and hopping. The trick is not to pursue the right idea but to be quiet and let the ideas settle out as they see fit. For me, being quiet in my mind often means moving.

Fortunately now I can walk without actively thinking about each step. I was so busy unthinking that I did not notice the young cattle stopped at the gate eyeing me curiously. Yesterday I had stopped to talk with them. One of the best lines in the Ladies No. 1 Detective series is just an almost throwaway comment about how good it is to watch cattle. I recommend it and now I have the leisure to do it without worrying about them. I took a moment to think how lucky I am before climbing the crest of the last hill and deciding that I would stop just short of the end of the road.

By now it was misty but we can have that for days without getting actual rain so I gave it no more thought than to enjoy the moist air. I threw back my hood and began to think in earnest about how the article might go when the mist began collecting in wee droplets on my jacket. I heard it pattering on the windproof water resistant synthetic surface before I felt a gentle slow moving trickle intrude on my consciousness by sliding right over that spot where Hindus put the wee dot--the third eye, the seat of our consciousness. This rain was not going to be ignored.

And so I trundled on with the soft rain drops for companions.

Wee Calfie is a Big Girl Now

I scramble out of bed earlier than I want to because Morris asks for help to get the cattle out onto the grass, including my calf, he says, in case I was not inclined to help initially. I have added another truism to my lore about cattle: just as you can't eat one potato chip; you can't move just one animal. Well, not easily at any rate.

Morris and I set out to move Wee Calfie while David finished feeding the cattle and opening and closing the gates so that she would get to the right field. She had been put in the pen with other cattle whose fate is not long term on the farm. From the moment I started feeding Wee Calfie, I told her and everyone else that her destiny was to be the Mother of Champions. Today was the day she would go out to the field where the bull, who has been bellowing with increasing intensity these last few days, will be joining her and the other heifers in a few days. If, that is, we can get her on her own to the field.

The first step was deceptively easy. As we approach the pen, Wee Calfie has already spotted me and comes up to be patted and steps out of the pen easily. Once, however, in the open corridor, she remembers what we used to do. She remembers the old choreography. I would feed her and then she and I would run up and down the paddock. This was cute when she was a little wobbly-kneed calf. Now it was scaring the hell out of me. One inadvertent glancing blow from her frolicking heels would send me to the emergency room or worse, so Wee Calfie danced alone as we persuaded her down the ramp toward the little door. I stood by the gate that she was not meant to go behind--an open, strawed paddock next to one of the bulls.

She sailed past me and danced all the way up and down the straw-filled dance floor until she noticed the bull, who had also noticed her. Wee Calfie is a big girl now. Eventually with Morris encouraging her from a safe distance behind and me calling her from in front, she came as far as the little door. The door is not really little. It is human sized; the other doors are animal and machine-size, so it is only by comparison that it is small. It is small enough, however, that Wee Calfie hesitates in the doorway and for an instant she and I are both wondering if she will fit through it. Wee Calfie is a big girl now.

Through the door. I begin to breathe easily again only to lose her again to the madcap choreography of her lost youth. After visiting with her friends, she trots toward me and we get her around the bend in the road. She stops by the paddock where she spent her first weeks and waits for the gate to be open. When it doesn't open, she admires the grass on either side of the road and turns back toward terra cognita. If Columbus had been a cow, the vikings would have colonized North America.

We compromise with Wee Calfie and get her in the "boxing ring"--a pen used for temporary holding of animals being transitioned from one place to another. We move the next two pens of cattle out and she tries to join in with them. We move the next bunch and she looks confused and lonely. I pet her and try to explain, but she is unsettled. I give her some hay as I run off to make sure the tiny knot of cattle stay bunched and turn where they need to be. All the others have now been moved without a hitch. I accept a ride back from the far field in the bucket of the front loader.

In front of the barn, Morris is ready to call it quits until later in the day, but I feel responsible for Wee Calfie, alone now and dispirited in the boxing pen. I get sent to open the gate into the field where Wee Calfie can start the next chapter in fulfilling her destiny. I have barely got the gate open before I turn around and see Wee Calfie standing there looking around. She sees me, and without missing a step, turns easily into the gate.

Paul's Letter About the Cows

My blogpal Paul left a comment to "Wee Calfie Remembers" with so many conversational threads that I thought I'd turn it into a regular post. Paul's edited comments are italicized.

By now you would have already given thought to "The Cattle Whisperer" then. Do they need that?

Cattle respond to the emotions around them. Once out in the steading I was getting angry with my husband and raised my voice, and then we both looked and saw that the cattle were becoming visibly more agitated. A calm voice can soothe them and moving slowly and patiently are usually best. My husband says, "Never hurry cattle when they are going in the direction you want them to be going." Some say classical music has a calming effect on cattle. Even if not, I'd enjoy it, so maybe next time I work with the cattle, I'll give it a try and let you know.

They seem so calm - normally.

I think calm is a pretty good description. They are herd animals and ruminants, so if they have food to chew on and company, they tend to look and act contented.

Mothers (especially first time mothers and certain breeds) can be wild right after birth, but this usually passes after a couple days. We have a Belgian blue cow who just gave birth a couple days ago and she was quite agitated when we approached the pen where she was with her calf shortly after its birth. She considered going through the steel gate to run over my husband. Then I could see the look in her eyes as she thought about jumping over it. We walked away and then came back a few moments later to watch from a distance that the calf was sucking successfully. Mom doesn't have to like us just now; she just needs to like her calf and be able to feed him/her properly.

Of course then there are the stampedes. Do these happen often?

I think a full blown stampede a la big cattle drives such as on TV westerns are quite rare. The cattle can run at a faster than you want to see clip when they are startled. Since I have been here I have seen cattle running too quickly in the wrong direction only a couple times. Once I heard that some of our cattle out in the field were running scared. We speculate that a dog or a fox may have run over the field, but we don't know what prompted it.

A nearby neighbor on a croft (small farm) had a helicopter land in the field enxt to his cattle and they were very upset and agitated. What made it even worse was that the person who landed the helicopter (an official) was trying to keep our neighbor away from his cattle. This upset both the farmer and his cattle.

Sometimes animals get out onto the road and then sadly it is often people who seem more wild than the animals. Drivers don't stop or slow down and too few people these days seem to know how to handle animals. I thought when I got here that everyone would know about farming and animals, but that is not the case.

Not long ago on a particularly difficult part of the road south (narrow, curving, and going downhill), a lorry (truck) full of cattle ran off the road. That driver and one immediately following noted that there were fields close by where they could turn in the cattle safely, but officialdom refused to let them do it. As a result more than two dozen cattle had to die a slow death in terrifying circumstances or languish until a vet could dispatch them humanely several hours later stuck inside the lorry. I imagine that those officials were city folks who had never been around animals.

I did meet one on a river bank when I was about seventeen...we approached one and it sort of raised its head and we saw it had horns. Little stubby ones, but still...So we left. We didn't stampede ourselves, just backed away rather cautiously.

Cattle are curious. They will follow you more out of curiosity than anything else. If you move faster, then they move faster in order to keep up. My husband tells a story of how he had a little dog that he used to herd cattle. This tiny dog would go up near the cattle in the field and then just lie down in the field. As the cattle moved up to see what was going on, he moved back. They followed.

The little horns would probably do less damage than any of the other massive parts of the critter. A simple head butt from my Wee Calfie from a casual tossing of her head nearly gave me a concussion when she was still only about 100kg. Now that she is 5 times that, you can imagine what an affectionate rub could do to me. Trans-species communication has its challenges!

You're always told if you run from a dog it'll just run after you, so we figured cattle must have about the same instincts.

Temple Grandin (Animals in Translation) puts cattle and dogs in very different categories. She argues that dogs are predators. They are born with an instinct to chase and then they learn which of the many things they chase they can eat. Cattle are prey animals. They have an instinct toward avoiding anything that chases them, so when they go after you it is about curiosity and whether they need to worry about you.

Cattle often come to associate people with feeding, so they may also have been looking at you as "provider of hay" or "bringer of barley".

Now, if it sounds as if I am knowledgeable and implies that I have always been comfortable with large quadrupeds approaching me, let me come clean. The first time I was in the field with cattle and they began following me, I sang to sound braver than I felt--to them and to myself. This singing probably made them even more curious or perhaps they like Joan Baez songs. At any rate, I walked at a steady pace with the pounding of my heart threatening to drown out my song. Inside I was repeating, "they eat grass they eat grass they eat grass" and hoping that they wouldn't do I know not what to me. The second and third times were easier. And then I learned by watching what others did.


I would really hate the branding. Sounds pretty excruciating. Couldn't you just tattoo them or something?

Cattle aren't branded any more. I asked my husband if it hurt. He thought about it for awhile and thought that it probably did hurt a bit at the time but not much and not for long. Now each animal has a metal tag in its ear and at least one large plastic tag. The large plastic tag contains both a herd number (six digits) and an individual number (another six digits). Within a month of being born, a calf gets its ear tag with its numbers (you an see Calfie's tag in the photo on that post).

The numbers are assigned by the British Cattle Movement System to uniquely identify each and every animal. When the tags come, the animal also gets what is called a "passport" because each and every time the animal moves, a page of the passport needs to be updated. All this information is managed on an online database, so the current location and history of each and every animal is available both online and from their passport. We were recently audited to ensure that all our animals had their tags and all their passports were in order. No small task, but better than branding in so many ways!