Two Cow Stories.

I think I’ve mentioned before that there is a herd of heifers in the field opposite my house, and a herd of bullocks in the field that encloses the back and side of my garden. One of the heifers has been pouring her little heart out all day, bellowing fit to disturb the occupants of the churchyard a mile away. She’s been standing by the hedge, looking across my garden in the direction of the bullocks’ field. I concluded that she’s one lovelorn little lady.

What I found interesting is the fact that the lay of the land here, and the height of the hedgerows, ensures that the two groups of bovines can’t see each other. The light breeze was also in the wrong quarter to carry any scent from the males to the females, and the males weren’t making a sound. Better still, when the bullocks moved to another field further away, the heifer moved a hundred yards along the hedge to a point closest to their new position. The eyeline from there is even more obstructed, so how did she know where they were? Is this further evidence that animals have perceptive faculties that we don’t possess?

Story number two is gruesome.

Helen and I went to the Highlands of Scotland a few years ago, to a wild part of Wester Ross near the Isle of Skye. One day we took a drive into the mountains and stopped to ramble around a loch. We decided to have lunch sitting on a rock near the water’s edge. Just as we were about to eat, Helen looked severely alarmed.

‘There’s no way I’m eating here,’ she said, and pointed at the water.

There in the shallows were several disembodied cows’ heads looking up at us. We moved to another spot, but found more of them there. Several further attempts produced the same result. There were heads everywhere, and eventually we moved away from the water to eat.

I speculated on how they might have got there. A river runs into the loch and I wondered whether they might have been dumped by an abattoir somewhere upstream, and then carried down with the flow. As far as I could tell, however, the river flowed out of a landscape virtually devoid of settlement. I suppose I’ll never know. If anybody has knowledge of such things...