I remember sitting beside one of the directors of the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association years ago at a banquet at the Banff Springs Hotel where I had been invited to speak. He did not look like a sentimental fellow. As the pie came around and I put my notes together for my talk I happened to mention that my son, Hart, was in 4-H and had become very fond of his Shorthorn steer and christened him Decaff.
“They do get attached to them,” he nodded. “I certainly did.”
“But you had to let him go, in the end, didn’t you?”
“No. I kept him.”
“What? How long?”
“Sixteen years, I think. I was married with two kids on the ground when Skip fell over with a heart attack. He would have weighed more than a ton and I think it put a strain on his heart. Anyway, we buried him in front of the house by the lane. And then we put that big Hereford statue on top of him.”
I think of my cattleman friend every so often, usually when someone is mocking me for giving a name to a chicken or giving up a pasture to a pair of miniature donkeys.
Affection is always the most sensible and reliable driver of a person’s energies. If we learn to like a thing we are much more inclined to look after it and protect it from the forces that would destroy it. This notion applies to everything from the chicken to the farm itself.
There is an ancient Confucian idea that the best way to look after the world is to start by looking after your own house and garden. A nation is a collection of communities and each community is made up of households. Any process of improvement or destruction in the nation naturally begins in the home. Only when those things around us are put in order should we begin to look outside our fences to solve neighborhood or national problems. As anyone with a small plot of land knows, putting house and barn in order can easily become a life’s work.
Environmentalists typically bristle at this notion and argue that it is too passive. They insist that more vigorous action is needed to tackle the big issues of the day like carbon emissions or disappearing species. But what action is likely to raise more of a sweat, shouting at a government or planting a few hundred different species of native plants on a single acre of marginal land on your farm to create a Miyakawa forest? Most of the small farmers I know have the energy to do both. But the creation of the Miyakawa forest to walk through will probably give more satisfaction and be of more lasting benefit to the planet.
Cows do not play well with forests of any kind. We have a Shorthorn steer named Will deBeast who weighs a thousand pounds and crashes through the woods like King Kong when he hears the ring of the grain scoop on the pasture gate. My son is in his thirties now and works as an arborist but he still misses his Decaff and is toying with the idea of training Will to work in the woods with him as an ox and a beast of burden.
What could go wrong?
According to the ox training manual on my bookshelf, the trick is to give the animal a name, which we have done. Then you get him to recognize his name by saying it to him repeatedly. (That would be my job because my son works during the day.)
Next, you teach him to walk in a straight line but the book is vague about just how this is to be accomplished. The horns on an ox serve as the steering wheel, but Will is a polled Shorthorn, which means steering would always be a problem. There was some degree of trampling involved 20 years ago trying to get Decaff to walk a straight line and he weighed half as much as Will.
The leaves are beginning to turn as I ponder Will’s future. Confucius also advised us to hold those things we love at arm’s length so that we are prepared to live without them when the time comes. My wife says she is better at holding Will at arm’s length than me and maybe I’d better let him go for his ‘sleepover’ with Scotty at Grey County Meats.