This book was quite a revelation. I think it was a present from my gran to my dad (she knew someone who worked on the farm or something I’ve been told). It was one of those books where the title was simply to good and intriguing to not pick up from the bookshelf as I was picking my summer reading. It turns out it’s a very accurate description of what the book is about.
Rosamund Young relates chapters in the lives of the cows on her family farm (Kite’s Nest farm, in the Cotswolds). I don’t think I’ll ever look at a cows the same. One of her goals in writing this book is to stop the reader from simply regarding meat as a product and help them see the animal behind it. She certainly has achieved this with me. I am now convinced cows are just as individual from one another as humans are. I think it’s quite easy to see livestock and think “food”, it’s just as easy for her to share interesting stories and memories from her life on the farm and help the reader see livestock as personalities.
Is it a particularly useful book, probably not. I can’t see that knowing about the lives or various bovines from past days would ever be of particular use. However it was absolutely fascinating reading about the different characters on the farm, I quite enjoyed reading about Print, a pedigree Ayrshire, who took a specific dislike to a wooly hat worn by one of the workers and would remove it constantly (this was only ever with this specific hat). In much the same way that Love Island is fascinating to watch for the personalities who end up on the show, this book is fascinating for the characters, i.e. cows, who end up in the pages (a bit of a stretch I know, but I can assure you these cows were much more interesting). There are many more small anecdotes just as entertaining as the hat one. It was a throughly enjoying read and I would certainly recommend the book (I think the book length is just right for a book about cows). I gave it a rating of 4 stars on Goodreads (disclaimer, I’m quite generous with my ratings, I tend to give most books four stars if I enjoyed them and I have yet to rate a book less than three stars).
I’ve always liked to think that my food had a happy life. The farm does not use their cows for milk as they believe it isn’t worth the cost (both from an economic perspective and from the cows’ perspective). It was quite interesting to learn that, during the visit of some expert on cows (sorry really don’t now any of the specific terminology here), he discovered that the cows on Kite’s Nest farm had significantly larger heads and brains than in the rest of the country. I will no doubt try to buy some meat from Kite’s Nest farm if I’m ever passing through the area, I don’t know if it’s possible to find happier food.
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