Rosamund Young has lived on an English farm, with free range cows, since the early 1950s. In this quaint and fascinating book, she shares her experiences of living and working with farm animals – cows of course, but also pigs and chickens – to illustrate how they have unique personalities, how they live in family groups and have friends, and are far more clever than most of us give them credit for. She finds that cows have empathy, guile, altruism, happiness, eccentricity – and illustrates all these characteristics with delightful stories: such as about the cow that always removes the woollen hat worn by one of the farmhands, but never anyone else’s; or the cow that wakes her with its desperate mooing, then leads her to its sick calf. Young is not a vegetarian, and as a cattle farmer you know that she is not catering for vegetarians. But she does have very strong views about the treatment of farm animals, in particular she is opposed to intensive farming of animals and of the numerous cruelties that go on unseen by supermarket shoppers. Alan Bennet says in his introduction to this book, it “…alters the way one looks at the world, with dumb animals not as dumb as we would sometimes like to think.”
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