Remember those archetypal ‘Hickory Dickory’ images of a cow jumping over the moon that you saw everywhere as a child?. You know the one – the beautiful fanciful vision that upon growing old you cast out of your ‘reality’ bag, to dwell in the ‘against the laws of earthbound physics’ bag.

Here begins the point whereby you think again.

This week, we have seen scared cows lift their 300-500kg bulk off the earth to ‘fly’ over fences and sprint into neighbouring properties. If you stood in the right place, the rising full moon would have easily given the illusion of a cow indeed jumping over the moon.

Here begins the tale of Big Jack, the missing Hereford steer…

Without a casting blame, but in some way maintaining our own aura of passable cow handling techniques, let us just say that third party involvement was the cause of Jack the giant jumper’s antics. His decision to fly over the fence and run for miles was heavily influenced by fear of a human who didn’t understand what he was about. Watching Big Jack ascend the other side of the hill from the dark depths of vertical ravine was on one hand, a relief in that he survived the descent – but mostly, makes you feel pretty helpless on Sunday evening at 8pm. Big Jack had left the paddock.

Here beings the hunt for Big Jack…

We have spent the last few mornings & evenings walking neighbours acreages, making up ‘Have you seen Big Jack?’ signs complete with offers of rewards (he is worth $600 and we’ve only had him for about 3 weeks). There have also been other ‘complications’ in terms of some visiting cows on our property that has meant that with the search for Big Jack we have been generally been feeling pretty pissed off with the whole situation all week. We also found a decomposing sheep had got its head wedged in our back boundary fence. Everywhere we turned, something seemed to be going wrong.

Here begins the happy ending…

This morning, on the way to work after another particularly depressing morning without our Big Jack, we got the call. Big Jack had turned up on a neighbouring property, approximately 5 kilometres away. Big Jack is back. Er, well not exactly yet – we will have to somehow collect him up and trailer him back home.

Here begins the life lesson…

Cows can and do jump and will jump, over anything.

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The trauma of saying goodbye forever to our first cows is over – the image and soundtrack of the heavy metal truck door closing behind them like a death-row prison door will no doubt haunt me forever. The whole process has been smoothed over because of the arrival of our new cows. It still feels strange to see unknown alien cows running around where minutes before there were six large black cows whom we knew well — but at least there was no gap between having cows. No eerie moo-less paddocks to haunt my conscience about the forthcoming fate of the first lot. For someone who has always been passionate about issues like animal cruelty, anti-vivisection etc… I can tell you that the thought of being involved in sending cows off potentially to slaughter, or even to live export to the Middle East (it could happen, depending on who buys at the auction) just seeps dark guilt into my heart and conscience. I reconcile it by seeing our involvement as a sort of calf fostering role. We raise them and give them the resources and time that we can for a limited period, but cannot be ultimately responsible for their future fate. We have all become accustomed to meat bought in sterile polystyrene plastic wrapped trays. It is a sobering and valuable reality check to really understand that a steak once had a personality.

Anyway, I’ll blow away the philosophical cloud of guilty conscience floating around me tonight and focus on the new task at hand – settling the new cows in. They are of course, extremely cute. For not the first (or last) time, I am again in love with our newest companions – destined again to be heartbroken in future, but committed nevertheless to giving out maximum love to the hoofed ones, ‘cos that’s what we do.

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This day old calf we adopted is just about plugging the leaking hole in my heart arising from selling our first cows off like commodities.

This is Balti.

From hand feeding him via a bottle for the first few days, to teaching him (using a wrestling-like technique and much sucking of fingers and biting of teeth) to drink from his first bucket, I find myself completely in love with the little fella.

Which is not the way to feel at all….

After being so closely involved with his first few days of life and being recognised by him as ‘mum’, with all the relevant communicative moos becoming an understood language between us, there is an inherent problem. Balti’s intended fate is a little bit closer to home than our big cows, in terms of our freezer compartment. That’s right, Balti is supposed to end up as home grown beef.

I really don’t know if I can handle that though. I know I have a year or so to get used to the idea….but I really really have grave doubts about whether his fate will be something I can stomach (in more ways than one). For now he is my wobbly legged comedic wee pal.

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Well, it was inevitable.

warning- lame comment alert:
We used to sing Puff the Magic dragon in primary school (who didn’t) and you know that sad bit in the ‘Puff the Magic dragon’ song when Jackie Paper stops visiting Puff and Puff cries and crawls into his cave… you realise (or at least I did) that life isn’t all about eternally happy animals or eternally young people. Well, I’m still having these realisations as an adult but surprisingly not via naff songs but real experience.

This week we are selling our cows to market. We will be getting more calves straight away, so there will be new tails swishing in the paddock, but I’m anticipating that saying goodbye to our first six is going to be a bit of an ordeal. They get picked up on Tuesday. Cows are amazing animals – you get attached to their habits, personalities and long eyelashes. We only named the little one (Sanjeev) and now I’m pretty glad about that.

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