PublishedFaber & Faber, October 2017 |
ISBN9780571336777 |
FormatHardcover, 160 pages |
Dimensions19.8cm × 12.9cm × 1.1cm |
At Kite's Nest Farm the cows (as well as the sheep, hens, and pigs) all roam free. They make their own choices about rearing, grazing and housing. Left to be themselves the cows exhibit personalities as diverse as our own.
Fat Hat prefers men to women. Chippy Minton refuses to sleep with muddy legs and always reports to the barn for grooming before bed. Jake's vice is sniffing the carbon monoxide fumes from the Land Rover exhaust pipe. Gemima greets all humans with an angry shake of the head and is fiercely independent.
In this affectionate, heart-warming chronicle, Rosamund Young shows that cows love, play games, bond and form life-long friendships.They'll seek out willow when they are injured and stinging nettles when pregnant. They babysit for one another; invent games; take umbrage' and grieve.
The reason most of us don't know about this is because modern farming leaves no room for the natural behaviour celebrated here. This charming, gorgeously illustrated book shows the domestic cow in a entirely different light.
Bill is one of the founders of Boffins and has been involved in selecting the books we stock since our beginning in 1989. His favourite reading is history, with psychology, current affairs, and business books coming close behind. His hobbies are reading, food, reading, drinking, reading, and sleeping.
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.”
