Cow Book

This is the second book in the Reaktion Natural History series that I've read. While Hannah Velten's writing style is less fluid than that of Dan Wylie, the author of Crocodile, Cow may be more forthrightly damning of modern Western treatment of another animal other than ourselves. When the aurochs was domesticated a little more than 7 thousand years ago, human societies could organize around a pastoral way of life. Settled living followed, all thanks to the cow. And of course, the wild aurochs is also the first documented extinction of a species, when the last aurochs cow died in 1547, in Poland. Our species hunted them to their end.

In Velten's words, "Having charted the deterioration of the human/cow relationship in the West, is there any way in which it can be built / We seem to have reduced the epitome of virility, fertility and strength to a mere sperm donor, the Mother and nourisher of the world to a mere milk machine and the strong, willing ox into a beef-and-leather factory. Cattle are regarded as objects and have been shunted to the periphery of our lives; only a few people are privileged to interact positively with cattle and witness their behaviour."