Opinion: Farming’s a funny business – and sometimes the joke’s on us
© Joy Bowes “You know what testicles feel like don’t you?”. I consider my response carefully. “I don’t know what a day-old calf’s testicles feel like”.
I have been restraining the calf for tagging and it has been suggested to me that, “while I’m there”, I might like to check its sex.
My fingers find a couple of small, round, furry things between its back legs. What else could they be?
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“I think he’s a bull,” I reply, then I look around me for the hidden camera.
I don’t recall any “hidden camera” moments during my career as a lawyer.
Is livestock farming unique in having the perfect combination of capricious animals and what someone described as “the innate hostility of inanimate objects” which will regularly make you look and feel a complete chump?
I am a trusting soul so it never crosses my mind that my partner is taking advantage of my ineptitude to set me up for a jolly jape.
There have been occasions when the joke is on him, too.
For example: calfie has got the wrong side of a fence and is running up and down bawling, while his mother bellows at him from the right side of the fence and the heifers who live in the field in which calfie now finds himself have ambled over in the hope that the humans who have just arrived will provide some entertainment.
We don’t disappoint them. We spend some time setting up sheep netting to confine calfie and keep him separate from the heifers, while the heifers do their best to knock it down again.
Finally, we succeed in erecting a makeshift corral with calfie inside, the idea being to catch him and pop him back into the right field.
Then we turn round and see calfie has somehow got himself back where he should be and is trotting off happily with mum.
Remember the scene in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? in which Roger slips his paw out of handcuffs?
An exasperated Bob Hoskins asks Roger if he could have done that at any time.
Roger replies no, “not at any time – only when it was funny”.
The humour is usually less sophisticated.
My partner has just reconnected the pipe to a water trough and is 100m away turning the water supply back on.
I retreat to a safe distance in case there is still a leak but – inevitably – I stand just where a jet of water shoots out and drenches me.
On another occasion, my partner is on the quad bike, towing a trailerful of silage and leading a group of cattle down a track from one field to another.
I have been told the cattle will “almost certainly” follow the bike, but my role is to stand by the gate and make sure they do go into their new field.
The procession approaches, the bike turns into the field, the cattle give it a cursory glance, but show little intention of following.
On seeing me waving my trusty plastic pipe and hearing my authoritative tones shouting “hup hup!” do they trot meekly through the gate?
They do not. They are clearly enjoying their outing too much. I dismiss any notion that I am going to stop them, and take refuge in the hedge as they frolic past.
Ah well, it keeps me humble.