AgriCulture: The Birth of a White Calf - Holy Cow!

AgriCulture bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week, Peter writes:

On Tuesday morning while making the morning chore rounds with our farm helper,  Darlene, I commented to her as we stepped into the sheep barn on the constant mooing of Donita, the matriarch of our British White cow herd. This mellifluous lowing had been going on periodically for several days, a sign that she was nearing her birthing time. However, despite her udder having expanded over the past few days to what seemed the bursting point (her engorged nipples standing out at odd angles) there was still no calf. Not even the beginning signs of labor. There she stood, about thirty feet away, as still as a statue, looking in that stolid, cowy way in our direction.

We were surprised, therefore, upon emerging from the barn less than twenty minutes later to find her standing quietly, assiduously licking the blood and fluids from her dazed calf, her placenta hanging like a bright red streamer from her vulva. We had missed the actual birth by minutes. But were not so late as to miss the strange aura cast by this scene.

Whether this aura was created by her massive size,  her marble-like whiteness, or the intense placidity she emanated, or a combination of all of these, it is hard to say. But the impression created, I realized, was quite different from that, say, of a ewe giving birth—by comparison a gentle, hushed, intimate affair.  And it set me to thinking of the real and mythical reputation cows have enjoyed in so many cultures; ancient Greece, India, the Zulus, and the Celtic world come immediately to mind. Seeing Donita hovering over the calf, rotating her huge body slowly to bring her udder over its head (the calf meanwhile feebly struggling to get to its feet), I felt myself a witness to something very elemental, something almost mystical.

In the Celtic world, where I started my life, it is not just cows but in particular white cows that have figured prominently in mythology. The tales, legends, and superstitions of Wales and Ireland, in particular, frequently focus on the white cow. This mythology of the white cow is also very much a feature of Scandinavia, where the breeds that have come down to us as the White Park (the horned white cow) and the British White (the polled white cow)  probably originated. It is generally believed that the polled white cow was brought to the British Isles by Vikings around the Ninth Century.

There are tales in Welsh and Irish folklore in which the milk of white cows heals the wounds of warriors, or acts as an antidote to poisonous arrows; and there is the tale of the “seven white kine”  that produce enough milk to satisfy “the men of the whole world”; and the even stranger tale of the “300 livers of white kine” that when spread on a plain inundated with snow magically clear it—to name a few.  One very characteristic myth is that of the “Magical Welsh White Cow”, a legend related in Carmarthenshire and recorded in the Welsh Sacred Book:

“In times of old there was a band of elfin ladies who used to haunt the neighborhood of Llyn Barfog, a lake among the hills just back of Aberdovey. It was their habit to make their appearance at dusk clad all in green, accompanied by their milk-white hounds. Besides their hounds, the green ladies of Llyn Barfog were peculiar in the possession of droves of beautiful milk-white kine called Gwarthe y Llyn, or “kine of the lake”.

One day an old farmer who lived near Dyssyrnant, had the good luck to catch one of these mystic cows, which had fallen in love with the cattle of his herd. From that day the farmer’s fortune was made. Such calves, such milk, such butter, and cheese, as came from the milk-white cow never had been seen in Wales before, nor ever will be seen again. The fame of of Fuwch Gyfeiliorn (which was what they called the cow) spread through the country round.

The farmer who had been poor, became rich; the owner of vast herds, like the patriarchs of old. But one day he took it into his silly noddle that the elfin cow was getting old, and that he had better fatten her for the market. His nefarious purpose thrived amazingly. Never, since beef steaks were invented was seen such a fat cow as this cow grew to be.

The killing day came, and the neighbours arrived from all about to witness the taking-off of this monstrously fat beast. The farmer had already counted up the gains from the sale of her, and the butcher had bared his right arm. The cow was tethered, regardless of her mournful lowing and her pleading eyes; the butcher raised his bludgeon and struck fair and hard between the eyes; when lo! A shriek resounded through the air awakening the echoes of the hills, as the butcher’s bludgeon went through the goblin head of the elfin cow, and knocked over nine adjoining men, while the butcher went frantically whirling around trying to catch hold of something permanent. Then the astonished assemblage beheld a green lady standing on a crag high up over the lake, and crying with a loud voice:

Come yellow Anvil, stray horns
Speckled one of the lake
And of the hornless Dodlin,
Arise, come home.

Whereupon not only did the elfin cow arise and go home, but all her progeny to the third and fourth generations went home with her, disappearing in the air over the hill tops and returning nevermore. Only one cow remained of all the farmer’s herd, and she had turned from milky white to raven black. Whereupon the farmer in despair drowned himself in the lake of the green ladies, and the black cow became the progenitor of the existing race of Welsh black cattle

That a legend about white cattle should explain the origins of a breed of black cattle is a characteristically odd twist of the Welsh mind.  But apart from that, the strange tale captures the exalted place the white cow has occupied in the imagination of the Welsh people. This Welshman still patiently awaits the day when he through his “mystic” white cows will one day become “…rich… like the “patriarchs of old”. “ It’s not bloody likely!” as they would say in Wales. Ah well then, but on the positive side, the green lady of the lake has yet to appear hovering above Turkana Farms to shout out her terrible summons each time we with our “silly noddles”  decide to send one of our “elfin cows” off to market.