Understanding Cows...and where to begin?

The beginning is a strange place. Is it with Buttercup, the Jersey house cow who was such an important part of my childhood? Or Daisy, who came before her, and whose colicy death as a two week old calf still hurts? A better start is perhaps with me explaining about the Aurochs, the extinct cattle species considered to be the wild ancestor of modern domestic cattle. And I need to explain why cows make us human - that's a big claim. Or why many anthropologists consider them to be the mother of all human civilisations. Should I explain how they bring meaning to the Old Testament phrase, "all flesh is grass" (Isaiah Ch 40)? How a third of the weight of every cow is actually not cow at all but the complex and amazing microbiome of their rumens which provides the nutrients for them to live, grow, make milk and ultimately provide for us humble simple-stomached people? And yet which also produce methane and carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gases which we all know are harming our very existence through global warming.

Or should I simply start with today, and why I've just forked out some quid to set up a blog site to talk about cows, and why I think I should, and why I think I'm entitled to do so? We can come back to the other stuff later.

It's time to say hello properly. I'm Owen, a vet, a consultant for the dairy industry. I also play a bit of table tennis in our local village hall on a Wednesday night. We go to the pub afterwards, around eight of us, all middle aged men, decompressing with a few pints and telling yarns, and usually taking the piss out of my total lack of ping pong capability, and then feeling a little bit worse for wear on Thursday mornings. And sometimes during these conversations, we talk about cows. What is absolutely refreshing for me is that this little friendship group of mine, which I have come to value tremendously, know nothing about cows at all (so I could tell them anything tbh!). Given that most of my other friends and people I spend time with, especially professionally, are vets, and farmers and dairy cow nutritionists and milk processors and milkers and foot trimmers, it's quite nice to be with people who come from very different worlds to my own. And what I have come to discover is that they have a lot of questions about cows.

And there are a lot of questions we should ask about cows. Like, why are some kept indoors all the time? Why don't we allow them to keep their horns? How can farmers steal baby calves from their mothers as soon as they have been born? How damaging are they to our environment? What are they like to work with? How come milk is so cheap? Why are they so tame? What's the difference between the brown ones and the black and white ones? What happens to the dairy cows at the end of their lives? Why doesn't anyone want male calves? So what happens to them?

And then my friends, living in our rural environment (the dairy heartland of Cheshire) with abundant curiosity yet not always feeling connected to their immediate surroundings in the same way as myself, ask: Why are farmers always miserable? Why do some farmers seem really rich and some seem really poor? Should we eat beef from the UK? Should we eat beef at all? Should we be drinking oat milk to save the planet? Why is such and such a farm so messy? Does it mean their cows are suffering? Why are some cows lame? Why do farmers blame badgers for TB? Is there badger culling going on around here, because we're definitely seeing more hedgehogs now? Is it safe to walk my dog along a footpath when there are cows grazing there?

And, because I like to tell a yarn or two myself, I get asked about my time working with the rather chaotic mega-dairy farm in Sudan; my visit to rural Mozambique training small-scale farmers for a "send-a-cow" charity project, and the occasion I found myself lecturing to dairy farmers and their vets in Iran. Travel, as well as cows, is a passion of mine, which has given me an even wider perspective on cows and the keeping of them, and their importance to communities and humankind worldwide.

So that's the reason for starting this blog. To help my beer swilling table tennis mates when they can't remember the answers (or tales!) I tell them in the pub the night before! And to answer some of these questions for anyone else who might be interested.

Welcome to my new blog - Understanding Cows. There we are, that's the beginning done. Just for the rest of it now...