Ever see a Scottish Highland cow? Neither had I. Of course this isn’t too surprising when you consider that I come from a climate where the poor creatures would likely need to shave every morning. So, for reasons I can’t fully explain, it was really exciting to actually see one in person. On the road. In Gower.

Mind you, I doubt the other drivers were as thrilled as we sat waiting for him/her to saunter across the road. And believe me, with those horns nobody was going to get out and give it a push to get it moving along.

Well, as I had plenty of time to Google highland cattle on my mobile phone, I learned quite a bit about them. First I learned that people love to take photos of them. This site bears witness to that. They’ve got their own website (who doesn’t?) which for some reason has information about UK disease conditions and the weather for Toronto. They also have a great little interesting tidbit on their site: “It takes 3,000 cows to supply the NFL with enough leather for a year’s supply of footballs.” Gads what do they do to those balls to go through so many? Do they lose them or what?!

Even the Queen raises them! And the Highland Cattle Society is one of her Scottish charties. They’re in a car advert too.

Now it may sound as if I’m making fun. I’m really not. I actually love cattle and find them fascinating, if not somewhat painful creatures, to work with. A bunch of years ago (nevermind how many) my ex-husband and I got the brilliant idea to go self-sufficient. This was due entirely to the influence of Barbara and Tom in Serbeton. They did it so we figured, what the heck so could we.

Reit.

So knowing virtually nothing about farming or animal husbandry, we moved, lock stock and barrel, to the farm country and set about having a go at raising our own food. A word of advice: Don’t try this at home unless you like a lot of smelly, mooshy, yucky manure filled dirt, ridiculous hours (who decided you have to milk at cow at 5:00 a.m. anyway!) and big feed bills.

Anyway, amongst a variety of fowl and veg we also raised one beef cow…well….castrated calf (we won’t go into that) whom we cleverly called Big Mac and a dairy cow called Guinevere. Guinevere was a purebred Brown Swiss and a beautiful animal. Her head about roughly half the length of my body before she was fully grown. Guinevere used to love to pick me up. She had an annoying habit of wandering up behind me, sticking her head between my legs and lifting me into the air. It was always up to fate where I landed. I had little-to-no input in the matter.

She also liked to step on my toes whenever possible - especially if we were walking about trying to learn how to walk in the show ring. Well, I became so popular with the local doctors that we decided it was time to do something about it. So we called in a professional - the farmer down the road. He explained that you have to get their attention first and the best way to do this was to whack them over the head with a 2 by 4 board. (He really said that!) Naturally I could not bring myself to actually do this so the cow never got shown.

Naturally, like any good Celt, I could go on forever with endlessly boring anecdotes about my days as a semi-self-sufficient farm woman. But today is the big game and I want to watch it so you’re spared this time round.

This entry was posted by Arwen on Saturday, March 15th, 2008 at 10:46 am and is filed under General Stuff, Life in Wales. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.