[Main Blog Post] Cows Don't Know What's Best for Them

[jprussell]

Another week, another blog post.

Comment here or else email me to get the comments included on the main page. I'm starting to think about a way to make commenting on the main site easier without giving up my commitment to a website "built to last", but I'm not there yet.

Comments

[alifelongme]

Thank you Jeff for this neat example.
I’ll be meditating on the value of limits in all areas of life.

[jprussell]

Thank you! I'd love to hear if anything especially interesting comes up.

[hearthculture]

I enjoyed the essay, and appreciate the analogy and reminder to not see limits negatively.
One thought to ruminate on: all this info about cows is about domestic cows. Perhaps the ignorance has been literally bred and trained into the animals through the process of domestication (reliance on an outside source for primary needs in exchange for work.) Much of the oft-quoted research about wolves, dominance, and pack mentality comes straight from studying captive wolves, and is disputed by those who've studied wild wolves who exhibit far less inner-pack drama and violence. Maybe the same applies to cows, and in your suggested analogue, to people. I've noted that children outside of the school system have a far different understanding and relation to all things than children domesticated into the school system. Perhaps we better understand our limits, and can honor them without fences, when our wildness hasn't been stunted by all pastures we are herded into.
I appreciate the thoughts you've provided and will ruminate further. ;)

[jprussell]

Huh, touche!

You're likely onto something - when you look at domesticated animals, they tend to have a lot of "neotenous" features - features normally associated with the young of the species. For example, wolf puppies have floppy ears, nearly-always upright tails, wide eyes, and spend lots of time with their tongue hanging out in a doggie grin. Domesticated dogs have all these traits into adulthood. Humans also are rather neotenous compared to other primates - big eyes, bigger foreheads, small noses, smaller teeth, and so forth.

At any rate, the analogy seems fruitful for humans as well - non-domesticated humans, like say hunter-gatherer societies, would have had similar emergent, ecological limits placed on them that wild ruminants have from predators. The paddock system is a comparatively clumsy simulation of that. Maybe self-imposed limitations for humans are in the same kind of category.

Secret Life of Cows

[dishwasher0101]

You might like to read the book 'The secret life of cows', by Rosamund Young, Faber & Faber, 2018
ISBN: 9780571345793. It's kind of a memoir about a farm which gives the cows a lot of choice about where to go and so on. A lovely anedcote about a cow anxious about a birth seeking out human help. I think of it as another perspective to add in alongside Salatin's ideas about bunching stock on pasture, well worth a read. There are a lot of behaviours which make sense that never emerge to be observed if the environment which allows those behaviours is missing in some sense.

Re: Secret Life of Cows

[jprussell]

Thank you for this, that does sound like an excellent complement to Salatin's work!