Life on the Farm, Part 2

My last post covered some of my experiences working on Cobham Park Farm in Virginia one summer.  Here I’ll share some of my experiences working with the cows.

Cows are God’s creatures and as such we should give them their due.  Having said that, I will tell you that they are stupid—sort of large, non-flying, tasty stink bugs. 

I happen to be a meat-eater.  On an intellectual, theoretical level, I suppose I am against eating animals.  Animals that are bred for human consumption are submitted to a rotten life and an inglorious death.  Still, I really enjoy plowing into a thick, juicy steak.  I’m not proud of it, but there you are.

Unlike humans, or at least most humans, cows seem to have little self-awareness.  But they are like humans in that they lack an understanding of their fate.  What is clear to humans, namely, that we raise cows to be rendered into hamburgers and other delicious by-products, they just don’t get.  While we prepare them for the slaughterhouse, they naively and passively go through their existence eating grass and hay, standing around, swishing flies away with their tail and making mooing sounds that can be to humans pleasing in a comforting or humorous way.  Scientists haven’t determined that the moos mean anything to other cows; they are just noises, the empty result of a bodily function.  I have read that cows interact with one another in socially complex ways, and maybe one day we’ll learn that cows have a sophisticated communications system of which mooing is a part, but I doubt it

On the farm, we had a couple hundred cows and a bull or two.  The bulls I didn’t mess with.  They were kept in a separate lot and I never had an interest in testing their ability to impale, or trample, or gore me into oblivion.

We tend to have a paternalistic fondness for cows.  Most days we would load up a pickup truck with hay bales and drive slowly through a pasture, dropping pieces of the bales off the back.  The cows did understand that this was meal time and would race out to us, so I’ll give them that.  But I wouldn’t bet on them to do well in a Jeopardy! tournament.

Occasionally, we would have to cull part of the herd—to give some of them doses of antibiotics or take them to auction—and move them to a different pasture.  If we were moving them to an adjacent field, we would just load the truck with hay and drive to where we wanted them to go, and they would follow obligingly, through a big galvanized steel cattle gate to the appropriate field.  For moves to farther destinations, we would herd as many of them as we could into the Ford F-350 truck and cart them over. 

One day my job was to load up fifteen or twenty cows into the truck and move them from one pasture to another.  The loading process is not easy.  They are not eager to walk up a narrow wooden plank into the confines of a flatbed.  It takes a fair amount of cajoling.  And once you get one in, you have to be careful that she doesn’t try to lumber back out. 

Eventually I got everyone on board and closed the flatbed’s gate.  That was a major accomplishment for a novice like me.  Feeling pretty good about myself, I climbed in the cab and set off for the destination field. 

There aren’t roads between pastures.  When you get to a gate, you stop the truck, open the gate, drive through and stop again to close the gate, then drive across the pasture.  When I got to the designated field, I looked for a place where the ground sloped up some, like a terrace, so the cows wouldn’t have such a steep descent on the plank from the truck to terra firma.  I spotted such an area and headed for it.  What I wasn’t considering was how to navigate the truck, which was very top-heavy, to the destination without tipping it over.  As I neared the unloading spot, I realized that I would have to back up along a slope.  As I did the truck began to tip, the right wheels leaving the ground.  The cargo was mooing loudly and was probably about as wide-eyed panicked as the driver.

When a truck carrying 15 or 20 cows begins to teeter on two wheels, few of the possible outcomes are good.  As the cows shift to the lower side, the angle of the teeterage increases, upping the odds that the truck will end up on its side.  If that happens, cows may crush one another, there is no way to quickly liberate them from the truck and the truck surely will suffer serious damage.  Not to mention the ramifications, employment- and self-esteem-wise, for me, who had already burned a tractor and committed other atrocities in a matter of a few weeks. 

By some miracle—an intervention of the Farm Fates or whatever—the truck righted itself with a loud and jarring thump.  With great relief and with still-shaking hands I backed up to the terrace, lowered the plank and prayed that the cows would disembark safely.  They did, and I returned the undamaged truck back to its storage-barn residence, mission accomplished.

Cows are a renewable resource—the gift, like Clark Griswold’s Jelly of the Month Club subscription in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, that keeps on giving.  We bred them to replenish the stock. 

Near the end of my stay on the farm we needed to check the cows that had been inseminated to see if they were pregnant, and separate out the ones that were for tagging and treatment.  We rounded them up and drove them to a pen that had a narrow chute.  Near the end of the chute was a device with two vertical metal bars connected to a lever.  The bars were apart enough for the cow’s head to fit between them.  When you pulled the lever, the bars closed enough around the cow’s neck so she couldn’t escape.  Once secured, she was ready for testing.  While they were confined we would also give them a dose of antibiotic by using a metal device that looked like a syringe but with a larger cylinder and no needle.  You put a large pill about the size of a paint ball into the cylinder, stick the syringe into the cow’s mouth as far as you can and then push the plunger to force the pill down the cow’s throat.

Determining if a cow is pregnant is not a wonder-filled, magic event.  It is a disgusting, smelly, low-tech process.  You start by putting on a plastic glove that goes up past your elbow.  You squirt antibiotic on the glove, lift the cow’s tail with your non-gloved hand, then drive your hand in the cow’s backside and pray the cow doesn’t decide to relieve herself.  That prayer, by the way, usually went unanswered for me.

When you are in nearly up to your shoulder you can feel the fetus, if there is one.  The cow does not display any signs of joy at the news of being in a family way.  She is deeply annoyed about the violation being visited upon her and eager to exact a kick into the violator’s groin.  So maybe they are not quite as stupid as I indicated earlier.

I got to check maybe a half-dozen cows this way and a couple of them were preggers.  Once done, we would release the cow and send it through a side-chute to one of two pens, for those pregnant and not.   By the end of my medical internship I was bruised, half covered in cow shit and doubtful that I would ever smell like a human again.  At the end of the day we walked over to an outdoor water pump and hosed ourselves off.  I think I burned my clothes.

Copyright © 2013.  All rights reserved.