Have Cow, Will Travel

A pak choi basks in the sun

Despite having 23 years of driving experience under my belt I have somehow never had the chance to tow a trailer containing a live cow. Until this week, when I got to do it twice. 

The first trip was to the livestock auction way up off the M5, forty miles away. Chester our 8-month-old calf was becoming too much of a handful for us. Mucking him out twice a day was no longer easy as he enjoyed headbutting our legs till they went dead then prancing round the straw in glee, hoofs flying. And he is still a relatively small animal - when he gets to adult proportions it would be a dangerous thing to be around him. So the difficult decision was made to sell Chester. We still have the other two calves, Molly and Bernard, but we are sad to see Chester go.

Sunday lunch dessert - Eton mess with soft fruit and chocolate

He spent the night in the big metal trailer with straw, hay and water, so we could straight off at 7:30am after a snatched breakfast. Tully* and Rocky were with me in the pickup. I drove as carefully as I could over the bumpy exit lane, and switched into low-geared 4WD to get up the very steep and narrow lane leading to the B-road. Thankfully we didn’t meet anyone coming the other way. The journey to the market was quite long as I wasn’t driving quickly, but we got there uneventfully. It appeared shut but then I noticed other pickups with trailers slipping through a side gate so I followed them.

We entered a large concreted area with lorries everywhere, and the back of the huge building on our right, looking like a hangar as there was no wall on this side. Instead there were a whole series of gated entrances, some marked for cattle, some for sheep, etc. We found the section marked “Stirk” which basically means teenager calves like Chester, and as one pick-up pulled away, I reversed the trailer back into the space. There was no one around to speak to so we wandered around looking helpless for a while until a chap pointed us to someone else, who eventually got round to dealing with us after he’d managed next door’s bay which had filled up with about twenty stirks. We opened the trailer doors and out walked Chester into the pen, no doubt a bit nervous but acting tough. He was shepherded through some more gates and into a small pen with three other stirks, and there we said our goodbyes. He was probably the only animal in there with a name. Good luck young chap!

Training the new wires for the espaliered apple trees

Although we couldn’t stay for the auction itself we found out later that he had been sold for £240, a bit lower than expected. His being half-Jersey counted against him we suspect as Jerseys take longer to put on weight. 

The second trip, three days later, was to take Jasmine to slaughter. She was exactly two-and-a-half years old. We left in the dark at 6:30am, after quite a job persuading her into the trailer. She got spooked and wouldn’t follow the feed bucket into the dark space. It took a fair bit of pushing to get her up the ramp. She’s a big black cow and does what she wants. Off we went to Snell’s abattoir the other side of South Chard, arriving just ahead of a few other livestock-towing trucks. I hadn’t been looking forward to the reversing. You have to do a sort of S-bend, first reversing to the left and then to the right to end up with the back of the trailer facing the open doors, all the while with impatient farmers waiting for you to get out of the way.

But I did it, with help from Tully and Arnie. The real struggle began then, to get Jasmine to go through the gate into the brightly-lit corridor. She had left the trailer but just refused to go any further.  The bucket of soy nuts was not enough to tempt her. Shoving an unwilling beast of that size  is nigh on impossible. It was all we could do to stop her getting back in the trailer. Eventually we got help from the staff and the farmer behind us in the queue, and we all managed to push her through the gate without having to resort to an electric cattle prod. It was all quite unexpected and distressing. Tully, who has seen countless Pilsdon cows go through these gates, said this was the most difficult unload he could remember.

So we are now two cows less, but not for long. Cuckoo is due to give birth to her first calf in just a few days time. Yesterday she was separated from the other milking Jerseys and put in her own chamber. The cycle of farm life continues. 

* human names changed :)