i've been in britain, oh, 2 or 3 days now and i have a funny feeling similar to one I had on the farm. we had two cows there, and every day they were to be milked twice. sometimes I helped out in the evening milking. after a couple of days it sort of hit me that i don't get cows...after years of working with horses, I acted the same way with the cows as I do with horses, (an animal whose instincts and perspectives on the world i more or less understand) and it just wasn't sort of..fitting.
so I asked daniel (another wwoofer who'd grown up on a dairy farm) millions of questions: are they social? if you put one alone does it moo to the other cows? is there a noise which you can make to calm them down? what do they want? do they consider humans as reasonable companions or do they just ignore us?
and so on.
so now after 4 months of getting accustomed to horses, suddenly being surrounded by cows is just confusing ("where are they going? why are they going there? why are they in this place at this time? i don't understand the trajectory of your life!!")
life seems just vaguely emptier here, more machinated(?), more routine, or less fluid...i dunno. hm.
Once, I had a cow escape it's pasture on me. It ran all around the farm and scared the sheep. They're strange creatures, with too baleful eyes.
ReplyDeleteI am intrigued by your chav tag....tell us more.
see, i wouldn't expect that from a cow at all! weird weird. i guess there are probably rebels in every species, though
ReplyDeletechavs were/are the biggest "culture shock" of all... so much leg, so much breast, so loud, really jarring for me on so many levels. i also just don't "get" why they do what they do. probably because getting drunk feels good. i dunno...