Complete Bullocks

Well blow me down. Here I am writing what’s meant to be mindless ramble of a blog, the online equivalent muttering to yourself in private, and I seem accidentally to have hit a nerve. And now, thanks to all your comments, I’ve also discovered that my mutterings are being overheard by you, and feel rather embarrassed

I’m stunned by your scare stories. I always tell myself as I walk that nobody really gets attacked by cattle. In fact, taking your comments as a statistical sample, 50% of us do.

We are reaching the end of the season for being chased by bullocks. I’ve just walked through a field which, last week, was full of stocky young animals, and now it’s empty. And I bet you anything the farmer hasn’t packed them off for a nice holiday by the seaside.

My heart goes out (a bit) to David Dimbleby, knocked out whilst loading a bullock into a trailer (thanks for this WalkTalk!). But from the bullock’s point of view, this may well have been a life and death struggle. Which it lost. So whose side are you on? The elderly presenter of Any Answers (itself as good an argument for mass-euthanasia as I’ve ever come across) or a shaggy, bewildered young bullock with liquid black eyes and a big soft warm nose? The answer, I guess, lies on the Meat Counter at Sainsburys.

The whole business has made me think about the difference between beef and dairy cattle. I hadn’t fully realised there was one. I’d not appreciated that the thickset, broad-faced, butch-looking brown jobs I meet on my walks are actually quite different to, and less dangerous than (thanks, Whitefeather!) the spray-painted black-and-white version, with their hollow haunches and pendulous, bulging, blue-veined udders.

And I know which I’d rather be.

Beef cattle (the butch brown type) get to keep their offspring with them. As you walk past, bravura calves try to stare you out, then lose their nerve and skitter back to maternal protection until you are safely past. There's such poignancy in that gawky, grudging, adolescent trust.

Eventually, the bullocks get packed off to play separately with their mates, and most will meet a sticky end at somewhere between 6 and 15 months. But at least their short lives have been pretty good.

Dairy cattle (the black and white paint jobs) have a less attractive lifestyle. A by-product of milk production, calves are removed from their mothers within 24 hours and males slaughtered at around 2 weeks old. 2 years on, the heifers have become milk-machines in their own right.

I’m not a vegetarian, mainly due to greed, but also because if we didn’t eat animals, there wouldn’t be so many around.

And you have to wonder if the massacre of dairy innocents for the milk they would have drunk is any more acceptable than the slaughter of beef bullocks for MacDonalds.

Sorry – all a bit serious. Your own fault for taking me seriously. In future, I'll just keep maundering away to myself like a sad old bag-lady, pretending you’re not there.

But thanks for being it. There, I mean.