TOUCHING BOVINE MEMOIR IS AN UDDER DELIGHT

John Connell left his family’s farm in Co. Longford to pursue a career as a film director, but at the age of 29 he was asked by his mother to return. She had her own Montessori school to run, and his father was getting older; they needed help with their beef herd, and if John would agree to come, they would support him in his desire to become a writer. The Cow Book is a memoir of the calving season during the winter and spring he spends back among the animals, muck and family tension of the small, traditional farmstead.

At the heart of the story is Connell’s struggle and eventual reconciliation with his father, whom some readers may regard as a forthright countryman, and others as a something closer to an outright bully. This ‘age-old rural drama’ of ‘two bulls in a field sizing each other up’ takes place in a harsh but fortifying rural environment, described in an original, and distinctly Irish prose. (‘“Begod,” I said, “I never seen a calf as quick”,’ he writes at one point, remembering how he told his ‘da’ about a calf beginning to suckle. ‘“You got a right lad there”.’)

The accounts of calving and farming in general are admirably raw and unsentimental, and the author’s honesty about modern animal husbandry makes this a worthwhile book for anyone interested in the origin of the beef in their burgers.

Threaded through the short, punchy chapters is a cultural history of the cow, from its wild origins through domestication to mad cow disease and artificial, lab-grown beef.

There are some shocking facts and figures here; we learn that there are 1.6billion cows on Earth, one for every fifth person, and that 80% of American beef is produced by just four companies.

Together with Connell’s own personal journey, this makes for an original and thought-provoking book.