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WORK TITLE: The Secret Life of Cows
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1952?
WEBSITE:
CITY: Broadway, Cotswolds
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: British
http://thesecretlifeofcows.co.uk/ http://www.thegannet.com/interviews/rosamund-young/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born c. 1952; partner’s name Gareth.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Farmer and author. Kite’s Nest Farm, Broadway, Cotswolds, England, co-manager.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Rosamund Young earns her living predominantly as a farmer. She manages her own farm, Kite’s Nest Farm, alongside her partner Gareth, and brother Richard. The farm specializes in producing organic meat products; Young has long focused on raising her animals as naturally and humanely as possible, and offers their meat for sale through her own store.
According to an interview featured on the Gannet website, Young never planned to get into writing professionally. However, she was one day approached by an interview who encouraged her to publish written pieces about her experiences as a farmer raising her animals. Said interviewer “came back six months later to buy some beef, and when I showed him what I’d written, he got three of the stories published on the front of the Sunday Telegraph Review.”
The Secret Life of Cows splits into two halves: one that talks about the current state of animal farming, and the other describing the herd of cows on Young’s farm, both in the past and at the time the book was written. The book is not only a memoir of Young’s years on the farm, but also a tribute to the cows she has raised and cared for along the way. Each of the animals Young has worked with over the years possessed their own distinct personalities, which she details extensively throughout the book. In the process of discussing her life as a farmer, Young also puts forth the assertion that animals are no less emotionally complex than human beings, and that they deserve the same level of respect as we give people. Young’s anecdotes serve to further drive this point home. Young recounts the bonds her cows developed with one another, as well as with her. Over time, Young and her staff came to develop different relationships with the cows they tended to. One of the cows came to view a worker there as a playmate, and greeted him by pilfering his hat. Young also observed signs of emotional distress when it came to mother cows and their calves. One cow became deeply angry with Young after not being able to keep one of her calves, who had grown too sick for her to care for; this continued for years. Another cow displayed signs of grief after losing her calf, and turned to her own mother for help coping. In addition, cows seem to be able to discern which types of food is most preferable on a nutritional level. The Secret Life of Cows also pushes for agricultural reform, namely through the ways most farmers treat the cows in their care. Young asserts that commercial methods ultimately harm the cows’ well being, creating lower quality products and greatly reduced profits.
“Young’s assertion that “all animals are individuals” is certainly supported by these entertaining and tender stories,” wrote a Publishers Weekly contributor. A writer in an issue of Kirkus Reviews called The Secret Life of Cows “a pleasant book about the joys of close observation.” On the London Observer Online, Rachel Cooke remarked: “Young’s style, careful and straightforward, is extremely soothing; her book should be prescribed for anxiety.” Boudicca Fox-Leonard, a reviewer on the London Telegraph Online, expressed that the book is a “small, but perfectly formed, volume.” She added: “It’s a charming manifesto for recognising that, like you and I, cows too have their own personalities.” NPR contributor Barbara J. King said: “This book will charm people who either didn’t know — from earlier books like Amy Hatkoff’s The Inner World of Farm Animals or from widely shared information by activists at rescue sanctuaries — that farmed animals think and feel, or who want to lap up more evidence that they do.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 2018, review of The Secret Life of Cows.
Publishers Weekly, April 9, 2018, review of The Secret Life of Cows, p. 69.
ONLINE
Gannet, http://www.thegannet.com/ (October 5, 2017), Sophie Missing, “Rosamund Young,” author interview.
London Observer Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (October 9, 2017), Rachel Cooke, review of The Secret Life of Cows.
London Telegraph Online, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ (October 1, 2017), Boudicca Fox-Leonard, “Intelligent, inquisitive, loving: the secret life of cows ,” review of The Secret Life of Cows.
NPR, https://www.npr.org/ (June 17, 2018), Barbara J. King, “‘The Secret Life of Cows‘ Aims To Show Animals As Thinking, Feeling Beings,” review of The Secret Life of Cows.
The Secret Life of Cows website, http://thesecretlifeofcows.co.uk/ (August 7, 2018), author profile.
Kite’s Nest Farm is on the edge of The Cotswold escarpment. It is run by Rosamund Young, her brother Richard, and her partner Gareth. Nature is left to itself as much as possible and the animals receive exceptional kindness and consideration. Kite’s Nest Farm produces beef and lamb from 100% grass-fed animals which are butchered and sold in the farm shop.
Rosamund Young
5th October 2017
Interview: Sophie Missing
Photographs: Sophie Davidson
It’s late August in the Cotswolds, warm with the suggestion of a storm in the air. Had we come to Kite’s Nest farm a few weeks earlier, we would have driven past fields of lavender ready for harvesting. Even at this in-between time of year, not quite autumn, not really summer, it’s beautiful.
Run by brother and sister Rosamund and Richard Young, and Rosamund’s partner Gareth, the 390 acres that make up Kite’s Nest farm have been in the family since 1980, when the Youngs set about turning it into one of the first organic farms in the country. Today, as then, the cows (and now sheep) roam free and decide where they graze and shelter. In 2003, Rosamund wrote a book about her herd, The Secret Life of Cows, describing how, left to their own devices, characters like Fat Hat II and Amelia play, grieve, forge friendships and exhibit as many quirks of personality as humans. Previously available through a small farming press, the book has just been republished by Faber & Faber who have sold foreign edition rights to eight countries and counting – so the local taxi firms have had a lot of business ferrying people to the farm recently.
The quarry-tiled kitchen – pleasingly full of bovine paraphernalia – is the hub of the house. Customers walk through the room to get to the shop downstairs where you can buy 100% grass-fed beef and lamb, plus Rosamund’s hand-milled wheat. If you’re lucky you’ll get a sack of potatoes from the garden or some foraged field mushrooms too (the postman is keen on the latter).
We eat thinly carved, flavour-packed roast beef and a bright crunchy beetroot salad at the long kitchen table with Abby, a student who’s helping Rosamund and Gareth on the farm (Richard now works for the Sustainable Food Trust). A mulberry tart winks from the windowsill and after a slice or two it’s time to move. Abby has mowing to do while we hop in the Daihatsu (“boring but the Land Rover’s got one door missing and you might fall out”) for a cross-country tour in which we meet matriarch Dizzy Lizzy and other members of the herd before heading back for a cup of tea.
Warm, funny and inquisitive, Rosamund is as happy chatting about how King Edward potatoes got their name (“marketing”) as whether Shakespeare wrote his plays (“It’s like the best Agatha Christie but you can never find out for sure”). When it comes to sustainability, farming and food, she is passionate without ever being preachy. Spending time with Rosamund is an incentive to think about how we eat.
Continued below...
More from Rosamund Young
Things
Inside Rosamund Young’s Kitchen
Recipes
Mulberry & Apple Flan
Places
Rosamund Young’s West of England Address Book
How did you come to write The Secret Life of Cows?
Somebody said to me the other day, “Have you always been a writer?”, and I said “I’m not a writer, I’m a ghost writer for the cows” [laughs]. I never ever thought about writing. But 15 or 20 years ago somebody was here writing an article about us, because we were organic, and every time he asked me a question about the cows I illustrated my answer by telling him a story about what they’d done, because that’s what I do. It was nothing extraordinary, just like you might talk about your dog or your cat. He said, “Have you got any more stories like this?” And I said, “Well of course, they happen all the time.” He said, “I wish you’d write them down.” After he’d gone I thought, well okay, I’ll write down that one I told him. Then I found I enjoyed doing it. So I kept doing it, just in a notebook, by hand. He came back six months later to buy some beef, and when I showed him what I’d written, he got three of the stories published on the front of the Sunday Telegraph Review. He rang me up and said, “They’re going to give me a thousand pounds for this article, is it okay if I give you £500?” I said, “Yes please!”
Somebody said to me the other day, “Have you always been a writer?”, and I said “I’m not a writer, I’m a ghost writer for the cows”
What happened then?
I just carried on, and when I thought I’d come to the end I tried to find a publisher and couldn’t. I basically gave up. Then, just by chance, somebody came to the farm who owned a mobile bookshop going round agricultural shows. He emailed my book to a little publisher in Preston, Farming Books and Videos, who’d set up in her back bedroom basically. It was the second book she ever published. When it sold a few and then stopped I presumed that was the end of it forever. Then suddenly last October, Laura [Hassan, Rosamund’s publisher at Faber & Faber] rings me up – and it’s been like Christmas every day since.
It must be nice to feel that there’s going to be a whole new audience discovering it.
It is – it’s just so extraordinary, something I never thought would happen. It was just coincidence really; one of the people who work for Faber was in a secondhand bookshop and heard somebody ask for my book and made a mental note. It coincided with Faber publishing the collected diaries of Alan Bennett in which he mentions reading my book, so the two came together. Apparently Alan Bennett had never met a cow in his life and never wanted to and thought they couldn’t possibly have secret lives – he actually says in the foreword that he thought this idea was daft, then [after reading my book] he didn’t.
Has he met some cows now?
I don’t suppose so, no! I’d love to introduce ours to him.
When did you move to Kite’s Nest Farm?
We didn’t actually move here till 1980. I was 28 or something. But I’d always been on a farm: from birth for 12 days in Condicote near Stow-on-the-Wold, then Clapton near Bourton-on the-Water until I was 13, then Saintbury near Broadway.
I love the cows’ names in the book and how literary they are – the orphan Jane Eyre was a favourite. Have you always given names to your cows?
Growing up, we had a dairy herd – Ayrshires. My father milked them, and I had to walk through them every day, going to school, and I just remember always feeling totally safe. The calves were taken from the cows and you put milk in buckets and you walked in to feed the calves. But I don’t ever remember naming anything until I was 13 or so – we moved farms, and then I started helping with the calving and getting more involved.
I never bought a pint of milk until I was 58 but we stopped milking the house cow, and now I feel guilty, but it’s so convenient
Self-sufficiency is important to you – when did you start thinking about that?
I was desperately determined to be self-sufficient from when I was 15, but of course you can’t be, because somebody in the house is going to want to buy bananas or tea or something. But we tried: we had a huge vegetable garden and we made fruit juices, we had our own meat and cheese, our own house cow, our own wheat. The pastry [for the apple and mulberry tart] is made from our flour – I mill it freshly when I want it.
Do you make your own bread?
I started when I was 16 and I found I really enjoyed it, and we never bought a loaf between the ages of 16 and 40. To begin with, I bought flour. Then I thought, how stupid, we’ve got wheat in the field – so I took the wheat to a miller. Then I thought, I need my own mill. Gradually it all came together.
Who taught you how to bake, or did you work it out by yourself?
I probably looked in several books, Elizabeth David particularly, and just experimented. I tried sourdough a lot, using yeasts off wild plums and things – I never quite perfected it, though it was pleasant. But I’ve become lazy and I buy it now.
I don’t think you sound lazy!
You can buy organic bread in Broadway [one of the nearest villages to the farm] and it’s very good. I never bought a pint of milk until I was 58 but we stopped milking the house cow, and now I feel guilty, but it’s so convenient. It’s a strange thing; I was determined never to stop, but that’s just what happened.
If you wait till the mulberries are almost black they’re very sweet, but of course if you’re just two minutes too late they drop off or the birds have them.
Rosamund on her recipe for mulberry and apple flan
When does your day start?
Usually about 6am in the summer, a bit later in the winter. I don’t like getting up when it’s dark – I don’t function properly. But in the summer it’s much easier. The trouble is, a day doesn’t end – quite often I don’t get to bed until 12 or 1am. Things always happen; somebody will get out, or a water trough will break down…
What do you have for breakfast?
We always have either porridge or muesli or perhaps a boiled egg. We’ve got handmade, Rosamund-made, sausages which are fantastic, but they’re frozen so you have to remember to thaw them. I mix them with a rusk that I make from our flour and organic herbs and they’re quite good.
I’m sure they are! Having made them and knowing what’s gone into them, I’m sure you appreciate them much more.
Well, in a way, the more you know, the more awkward other things get. When I go to London, I take sandwiches. I don’t want to go into a shop and buy things, because you know so much about what could have happened: all the shortcuts that were taken… Though a great big rucksack with loads of things in it is heavy.
On The Menu
Lunch with Rosamund Young
Kite’s Nest Farm, Worcestershire, August 2017
To eat:
Kite’s Nest Farm roast beef
Boiled King Edward potatoes from the garden
Raw beetroot and carrot salad with apple juice dressing
Mulberry and apple flan with cream and yoghurt »
Raspberries
To drink:
Apple juice
Tea
More Recipes »
Would you have time to stop for a proper lunch like this on a working day?
We do eat – we eat well – because we can’t keep working if we don’t. It might well be sandwiches or poached eggs or a salad. Generally we eat what vaguely looks like a proper meal at night. But we do actually eat three meals a day, because you need to when you’re doing physically hard work. I’d like to have a proper lunch and then a very small supper – I used to do that years ago, but it just doesn’t seem to work out these days.
Do you enjoy cooking, or do you see it more as means to an end?
I do, for people I like, which is usually the people who are here. I don’t think I could run a restaurant, I wouldn’t be organised enough – everybody would sit there for three hours waiting for their food. But I do enjoy it because it’s all part of the thing, you know – I love farming and I think what you do to the soil is so incredibly important for the planet and for your own health, so you eat what you produce. In the spring we were foraging quite a bit, eating wild garlic, comfrey and dandelion, chickweed and nettle, all sorts of things. It’s good to use what’s there.
I’ve just been so lucky – I’ve never had a job, I’ve never had to go for an interview… If you’re in farming, if it’s in your blood, then that’s it
Do you eat much meat?
We do, because we have it. I often wonder whether I’d be vegetarian if we didn’t produce meat but, you know, I take the animals to the slaughterhouse and I feel I can justify it to myself if I give them a good life and see it through to the end. It’s not perfect, I’m not going to pretend it is, that there’s no suffering. But we have got a very good abattoir so I’m really grateful1.
You must have seen lots of changes in farming over the years.
I’ve just been so lucky – I’ve never had a job, I’ve never had to go for an interview, I haven’t experienced the ignominy of being told “No thank you”. If you’re in farming, if it’s in your blood, then that’s it. But I know three farmers whose children have chosen not to farm, which would have been unheard of in the past. I think technology’s got a lot to answer for – people get seduced by the fascination of technology which didn’t happen years ago. But of course we’ve got modern machinery now which you can’t mend with a spanner; in the past you could mend everything by kicking it or hitting it. Now if something goes wrong, a man comes out with his laptop, plugs it into the tractor and tells it to behave itself. It’s so counterintuitive, because if you’re a farmer you get an oily rag and set about mending something. Farming should be about looking at the plants, looking at the animals, and making decisions rather than letting machines make them.
Why is food so important to you?
I’m very obsessed with the power of food to make people well – or not well. I looked after my mum for 40 years: she was an invalid, and she had an incredibly awkward diet, so every day I was making tiny little meals from scratch. She got dramatic reactions to chemicals in food; that’s partly why we became so self-sufficient and I had to make bread twice a week for her. If I got the food right, she could be completely happy and pain-free and able to enjoy life and talk to people. If I got it wrong, she could become either ill or in pain or bad-tempered, or all three. It was just amazing, the effects. So that heightened my awareness. I feel that a lot of people never know what it’s like to feel well because they eat rubbishy food which looks nice; they spend their hard-earned wages on something that’s been concocted to look attractive. But of course we all need different things, that’s the interesting thing. A cow needs grass and that’s it. A hen needs wheat, and preferably grass as well, but people all need different things.
For more about Rosamund Young, Kite’s Nest Farm and The Secret Life of Cows, click here
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Posted 5th October 2017
In Interviews
Interview: Sophie Missing
Photographs: Sophie Davidson
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The Secret Life of Cows
Publishers Weekly. 265.15 (Apr. 9, 2018): p69.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Secret Life of Cows
Rosamund Young. Penguin, $23 (160p)
ISBN 978-0-525-55731-9
Reflecting on over 30 years as a cattle farmer in Worcestershire, England, Young muses on her herd members' inner lives and shares best practices for keeping them happy and healthy in her appealing, if somewhat disorganized, book. Her contention that "every animal has a limitless ability to experience a whole range of emotions" is demonstrated through anecdotes of her cows engaging in familial love and bonding, play, and even grief. These include a touching story about a young cow seeking out her mother for comfort after giving birth to a stillborn calf; a mother who held a grudge against Young for three years for taking away her sick calf; and a mischievous cow that amused herself by removing the same workman's cap every time she saw him. Young also makes a case for the species' intelligence, as evinced in their ability to make healthy eating choices. Her prose is contemplative and idyllic, featuring charming phrases like "Every old hedge has a story to tell" and folksy section titles like "A little bit about horses" and "A digression on sheep, and pigs and hens." Although the book's loose-knit structure can cause it to read more like a series of journal entries than a polished text, Young's assertion that "all animals are individuals" is certainly supported by these entertaining and tender stories. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Secret Life of Cows." Publishers Weekly, 9 Apr. 2018, p. 69. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A535100003/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2d91b77a. Accessed 28 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A535100003
Young, Rosamund: THE SECRET LIFE OF COWS
Kirkus Reviews. (Apr. 15, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Young, Rosamund THE SECRET LIFE OF COWS Penguin Press (Adult Nonfiction) $23.00 6, 12 ISBN: 978-0-525-55731-9
British farmer Young shows how she has continued her family's farming tradition, a moral, observant, and personal way of farming that predates the "organic" trend or even the use of the term.
"I hope that I am beginning here what began as an oral tradition," writes the author in this celebration of her farm, Kite's Nest, and her cows. Though the table of contents lists a number of chapters (a division Young resisted), there are actually two main parts to this short book. The first is a farming manifesto presenting the compelling argument that farm animals are more like individual people than most of us would ever suspect. They have their own personalities, levels of intelligence (that vary widely in some species), and common sense about what is best for them. They are naturally happy, until humans interfere. As the author notes, interfering with their happiness is not only immoral, it is bad farming: The milk and the meat taste worse, the animals are less healthy, and those who consume them will be as well. "Happy animals grow faster, stay healthier, cause fewer problems and provide more profit in the long run, when all factors, such as the effects on human health and the environment are taken into account," she writes. The longer second part of the book is a fondly annotated genealogy of the animals on her farm. We learn of the names of the animals, their individual temperaments and friendships, the preferences they develop for some humans over others, and their willingness to forgive or not (as perceived by the author). This part could have been much longer, the author insists, even if it had focused solely on "Amelia...an unusually delightful calf, more trusting and understanding than we would have thought possible....I could write for a thousand pages, listing every detail of Amelia's life, and I still would not have presented an even half-accurate picture of her."
A pleasant book about the joys of close observation.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Young, Rosamund: THE SECRET LIFE OF COWS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A534375088/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=52d247d5. Accessed 28 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A534375088
The Secret Life of Cows by Rosamund Young – review
Ever wondered if cows bore a grudge? This may be the book for you
Rachel Cooke
@msrachelcooke
Mon 9 Oct 2017 09.00 BST
Last modified on Wed 21 Mar 2018 23.49 GMT
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Dairy diary: are cows more intelligent than people realise? Photograph: Peter Cade/Getty Images
T
his meditative little book isn’t new: it came out first in 2003, when it was published by a small farming press. But then a beady-eyed editor at Faber noticed Alan Bennett had praised it in his diary (“it alters the way one looks at the world”, he wrote in an entry on 24 August 2006), with the result that it has now been republished. Its author, Rosamund Young, who lives and works at Kite’s Nest, an organic farm on the edge of the Cotswold escarpment, must be thrilled – or maybe not. Having read her book, which is very sensible but also somewhat dreamy and a bit obsessive, she strikes me as the kind of woman who would rather be standing in a muddy field in her wellies than listening to some eager townie praise her for her wisdom.
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Young’s parents began farming in 1953, when she was 12 days old and her brother (with whom she and her husband still run Kite’s Nest) was nearly three; she continues their tradition of treating animals as individuals with varied personalities, rather than as identical members of herds. The Secret Life of Cows, then, is essentially a collection of anecdotes about the many beasts she has hand-reared down the years: bovines, mostly, though there are a few stories about sheep and chickens, too. In a way, it’s like a book for children. Every animal has a name – Araminta, Black Hat, Dorothy – not to mention parents, brothers and sisters. Most have adventures, albeit not massively exciting ones; Young refers casually to their “conversations”, as if cows chat just like humans. After a while, though, you get used to all this, and as a consequence the world does indeed tilt. Or bits of it, at least. This book will change forever the way you see a field of ayrshires or friesians.
Some are vain, loving to be groomed and reluctant to go to bed at night with muddy ankles
I said “obsessive”. At one point, Young insists of an “unusually delightful” calf called Amelia that she could write about “for a thousand pages, listing every detail of her life and I still would not have presented an even half-accurate picture of her” – at which point I did panic slightly. Thankfully, though, she limits herself to telling us that Amelia was always able to recognise a red car that belonged to Young’s brother, Richard – a detail that speaks to her main point, which is that cows (and sheep and chickens) are far more intelligent than people realise. Though this is relative, of course. As she also notes: “If a cow’s intelligence is sufficient to make her a success as a cow, what more could be wished?” However, they have other qualities, too, many of them contradictory. They are loyal, and have a tendency to hold grudges. But they are also apt to forget one another – even their poor, dead calves – within weeks. Some are vain, loving to be groomed and reluctant to go to bed at night with muddy ankles. Others are picky about food, showing a marked preference for, say, mouse-eared chickweed over other grasses.
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Young’s style, careful and straightforward, is extremely soothing; her book should be prescribed for anxiety. But it doesn’t, it must be said, answer all one’s cow questions. Bennett, in his diary, notes that he found himself wondering about their sex lives: are cows flirty? Young doesn’t tell us. Nor does she address the issue of their rage, which was, I must admit, the main reason I wanted to read The Secret Life of Cows. I am, you see, increasingly scared of strange cows, sometimes insisting to my husband that we detour on walks to avoid them; when they trot en masse towards you, as they seem to do more and more often, it is not un-frightening. I can’t help but think about the bit in Posy Simmonds’s graphic novel, Tamara Drewe, where the novelist Nicholas Hardiman meets his death in a field of cows: Simmonds grew up on a farm, and knows whereof she draws.
Young, some of whose cows are (terrifyingly) able to cross cattle grids and perform all manner of other physical feats, tells us that when an animal shakes its head, it’s giving you a warning. The message is: keep away. But she does not expand on this, perhaps because, what with knowing her own beasts so very well, she has never been on the receiving end of cow rage. Apparently, she sometimes carries a large brush with her, the better to calm the curious and the cross with a few soothing strokes across the cliffs of their flanks – not something I’m likely to start doing any time soon. Still, one fact I do know now is that cows strongly object to perfume. This, I will remember. In the future, all walks will be strictly Mitsouko-free.
• The Secret Life of Cows by Rosamund Young is published by Faber & Faber (£9.99). To order a copy for £6.99 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
Intelligent, inquisitive, loving: the secret life of cows
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Leading lady: Rosamund Young at Kite’s Nest Farm where she breeds free-range cattle for beef Credit: John Lawrence
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1 October 2017 • 7:00am
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rint is a pedigree Ayrshire cow who once took a strong dislike to a woollen hat worn by one of Kite’s Nest Farm’s workers. Approaching him affectionately, she would allow herself to be stroked, and then, when she saw her opportunity, she would remove the hat with her mouth, dropping it carefully on the straw. However many times it was replaced, she would never tire of the game. The farmworker refused to change his hat; Print never removed anyone else’s.
The mother of two bull calves is one of many characterful cows that populate Rosamund Young’s illuminating book, The Secret Life of Cows. Her small, but perfectly formed, volume weaves entertaining anecdotes and profound insights harvested from a lifetime of caring for cows.
It’s a charming manifesto for recognising that, like you and I, cows too have their own personalities. They can be highly intelligent or slow to understand; friendly, considerate, aggressive, docile, intuitive, dull, proud or shy. There are the squabbles between mums and daughters, calves who play tag as youngsters and form lifelong bonds, deaths, grief, and strange predilections – consider Jake, a herd bull addicted to sniffing carbon monoxide fumes from Land Rover exhaust pipes.
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Well looked after: farmer Rosamund Young is passionate about ethically produced food Credit: John Lawrence
“I was going to call it the Social Life of a Domestic Cow,” says Rosamund, who despite the book’s success (it is being translated into 19 languages), insists, “I’m not a writer, I’m a ghostwriter for the cows. I’m a farmer.”
First published in 2003, it has been reprinted in part thanks to a mention in Alan Bennett’s diary entry in Keeping On Keeping On for August 24 2006, in which he said, “it alters the way one looks at the world”.
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Yet for 64-year-old Rosamund, who runs the farm with her brother, Richard, it’s the only world she has ever known. Her parents were organic pioneers who started farming organically in 1953, moving to Kite’s Nest in Worcestershire in 1980. As a 15-year-old, Rosamund’s dream was to be self-sufficient, growing her own vegetables, rearing her own meat and making her own bread. “I didn’t buy my first pint of milk until I was 58,” she declares.
Cattle merely get on with day-to-day living, moving or failing to solve problems as they arise
All but a handful of the puzzle of 113 cattle that form a clear family tree in Rosamund’s head are descended from that original herd. Since the Seventies the farm has operated a single-suckle system, allowing each cow to rear its own calf. The last female animal they bought was a heifer calf in 1976.
Today, as Rosamund drives her antiquated Land Rover at vertiginous angles around the 390-acre farm, it can be a challenge to spot the animals. “The thing with free-range cows is that you can’t find them,” bellows Rosamund over the engine. Apparently there are also 374 sheep in two flocks hidden away somewhere.
Finally coming upon one of the herds, Rosamund singles out a big black bull, Prometheus. “He’s called Promiscuous at times,” she observes.
Every cow gets a name when it’s born, and swiftly a nickname. The book is full of references to Fat Hat – originally called Harriet, until she got fat – and her various descendants.
At 15, Rosamund’s dream was to be self-sufficient, growing vegetables and rearing her own meat Credit: John Lawrence
In a similar vein Rosamund points out Two Horn Dot, so called because her sister is known as One Horn Dot, having knocked an appendage off. “Their older sister they don’t like at all. But they love each other to pieces.”
It was explaining such soap operatic tangles that inspired the book in the first place. As one of the first organic farms, Kite’s Nest was frequently visited by the press and it was while showing Adam Nicolson, the Sunday Telegraph writer, around the farm in the mid-Nineties that Rosamund found herself answering his questions about the cows not unlike the way people talk about their children.
“It didn’t strike me as anything extraordinary, but he suggested I write them down. And once I started jotting things down, I realised I enjoyed it.”
Rosamund says that when the book was first published she was delighted to receive letters from farmworkers and herdsmen who had loved the cows in their charge but who never felt free to admit or show it openly.
I love my animals and I don’t want them to go to be killed. But if I didn’t kill any I couldn’t afford to keep them
For those thinking this all sounds rather jolly, then the two chest freezers in the farm shop filled with fillet, sirloin and everything else are a reminder that while they are appreciated and cherished, they are definitely not pets.
“I love my animals and I don’t want them to go to be killed,” explains Rosamund. “But if I didn’t kill any I couldn’t afford to keep them. I have to be practical. I need to eat and I believe eating meat is part of a balanced diet.”
In 1974 the family moved from dairy farming to solely beef, deciding it wasn’t profitable as a small farmer without compromising on their care for the cows. “The smaller you are, the harder work it is. And those who are making a profit are doing what I feel is unacceptable.”
She is outspoken about the conditions on more intensive dairy farms and passionate about ethically produced food. “Some cattle are kept in barns 24/7, 365 days a year. I don’t think it’s right and I don’t think the milk is good for a person because a cow is designed to eat grass, not grain.” She places fault with supermarkets that have treated milk as a loss leader. “I would have thought it would be completely obvious we should be paying more for milk,” she says.
Rosamund's parents were organic pioneers who started farming organically in 1953, moving to Kite’s Nest in Worcestershire in 1980 Credit: John Lawrence
While it’s easy to admire Rosamund’s consciousness over cash approach, it has often been at her own expense. She breaks the textbook rule that the only way to be profitable is to have a cow in calf once a year, and this hits her in the wallet. But like any exemplary employer, she believes in allowing Rolls-Royce maternity leave for her cows.
With that in mind, perhaps the secret life of cows is more familiar to us than we might care to admit. Rosamund certainly thinks so.
“During a lifetime of observing cattle I have witnessed amazing examples of logical, practical intelligence and some cases of outright stupidity, both of which qualities I have also remarked in respect of human beings,” she says. “Cattle merely get on with the day-to-day business of living, moving or failing to solve problems as they arise. The important point is that they should be given the wherewithal to succeed as animals, not as inadequate servants of human beings.”
The Secret Life of Cows by Rosamund Young is published by Faber (£9.99). To order your copy for £7.99 plus p&p call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk
'The Secret Life of Cows' Aims To Show Animals As Thinking, Feeling Beings
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June 17, 20185:01 AM ET
Barbara J. King
The Secret Life of Cows
by Rosamund Young
Hardcover, 139 pages
purchase
A slim mahogany-colored cow, Dolly was an attentive mother to her first four offspring, all boys, at Kite's Nest farm in Worcestershire, England.
Then Dolly II, a pale-colored girl, was born and became the recipient of that bovine love.
In The Secret Life of Cows, published this week in the U.S. by Penguin Press, farmer Rosamund Young tells the story of what happened when Dolly II grew up and gave birth herself.
Dolly II's calf was born dead and her womb was displaced in the process, requiring a vet's care at the farm. Young left Dolly II once she was resting comfortably, weak and unable to stand but appearing to be content where she lay. One hour later when Young went back to check on her, Dolly II was nowhere to be seen.
"After much searching we found her three fields away," Young writes, "lying at the feet of her clever old mother being licked all over and comforted far more ably than we could ever have done."
Dolly II had needed her mother and, on a large farm, she set out to find her.
"We were glad to see," Young notes, "that our policy of leaving gates open to allow all the stock to choose where to roam had been vindicated."
Six days later, Dolly II felt strong enough to resume life on her own and departed from her mother's side. No mother-daughter interaction of this nature could possibly take place on factory farms where thousands of densely crowded cows lack free movement — and mother-offspring ties are severed within days of a birth so that the mothers may be kept in a state of continual pregnancy and milk production. Dairy cows are "much misused animals," as Young puts it.
At Kite's Nest, the philosophy is different. Calves stay with their mothers "for as long as they choose," suckling freely for nine months at least, and given leeway to decide when and where to move around the farm, as Dolly II was.
The Secret Life of Cows succeeds in showing that cows are thoughtful beings with individual personalities. At times Young's approach is whimsical, perhaps overly so, as when she translates what she takes to be bovine thoughts directly into human language. The cow Black Araminta, a "magnificently capable" animal who doesn't relish human assistance unless it's absolutely needed, is voiced in this way by Young: "Thank you for all you did but from now on, help me only if I ask you to."
But there's great insight, too, born of long experience: Young's parents began farming when she was 12 days old. Young notices that cows figure out what plants to eat to medicate their health troubles, and recounts the ways in which cows grieve, two points fully in line with the latest animal-cognition science. She describes how a cow wishing to be groomed by a friend will offer her head "bowed and submissive," then cautions that the head is held almost identically before a cow offers a warning before erupting into aggression. The difference, visible only to seasoned observers, is in the degree of muscle tension.
Other farmed animals are described, too: a pony who by his wits manages to save an old mare wedged in a ditch; and, in one of the loveliest stories, two hens who become "devoted bodyguards" to an older companion injured in a fox attack. The pair fussed over their friend, refusing to eat until she did and offering her solace by physical touch with their beaks.
This book will charm people who either didn't know — from earlier books like Amy Hatkoff's The Inner World of Farm Animals or from widely shared information by activists at rescue sanctuaries — that farmed animals think and feel, or who want to lap up more evidence that they do.
It may not so readily warm the heart of animal lovers who extend their compassion for animals to the food they eat. Young notes that farmers have a "moral obligation" to treat their animals well — but at the same time she sells "retail beef," lamb, and mutton in the Kite's Nest shop. Farmers have for centuries felt affection for individual animals and then proceeded to serve those animals up for the family dinner. Yet given Young's desire to embody a different type of farmer, it would be informative to hear how she reconciles her kindness with the killing of her animals. What does she make of the argument that the term "humane slaughter" is an oxymoron because, even when it's carried out as painlessly as possible, it nevertheless deprives an animal of a life he or she wanted to live via the very intelligence and depth of feeling Young painstakingly details?
She doesn't say, and that's a loss.
She does remark that meat from animals reared the way she advocates "actually tastes better" and that "happy animals... provide more profit in the long run." The bovine bottom line is this: Cows would no-doubt use their reasoning and decision-making powers, so enticingly outlined by Young, to choose in a fast heartbeat to leave a factory farm and dwell instead at Kite's Nest farm.
Barbara J. King is an author and anthropology professor emerita at the College of William and Mary. Her most recent books are How Animals Grieve and Personalities on the Plate: The Lives & Minds of Animals We Eat.