Massage For a Calf

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 773, 14 May 1954, Page 25

Massage For a Calf

by

SUNDOWNER

APRIL 22

HAD not realised until I watched Elsie how often a cow washes her calf; how thorough the operation is; and how stimulating to the calf’s bodily functions. It amuses me, too, to notice how close to a chiid’s the calf’s reactions are. Calves don’t cry like children, but they fight; they have no free arms. but they have vigorously protest-

ing necks; they can’t make faces, but they can raise lower twiet and

reverse their heads. All these things our calf does while Elsie lays on her tongue. For it is not a gentle laying on. It is a kind of oral belabodring; washing and brushing at the same time; massage; physical manipulation. If I were a chiropractor I would go to a cow for technique. And if I had not watched the process so carefully before, I had been as

unaware of the result. This calf’s coat almost glows. Its skin is movable, loose and free. I can almost see and hear the blood circulating; the abdominal muscles moving; the chemical engines at work. I can’t help thinking that with the exception of her vocal chords, which have not once been exercised since she was born, this calf compares with a handfed calf as a well-oiled, smooth-running bicycle compares with a- bicycle that will merely go. ‘k * *

APRIL 23

RAWENE correspondent thinks I should make a pet of a hare, and tells me in a kind note how the poet Cowper kept three hares and found them excellent companions, "engaging his attention without fatiguing it." It is a long time since I read Cowper, but I

cant recall that he had twelve pet sheep, three in their first year, five in

their second, three in their third, and one in her fourth, two spoilt cows and a calf, six foolishly preserved and cheeky cockerels, a hen that had just emerged out of season with eleven halfbred chickens, a superannuated dog, and a rather demanding cat. With those

trailing him every day, holding firmly to his heart strings and liquidating whatever prudence he may once have had, I am not sure that he would have been able to carry a hare every morning into the garden to lie under the cucumber vine "sleeping or chewing the cud till evening," and I, don’t think a New Zealand hare, however affectionate he proved to be, would be content when he woke up to eat only "sow thistles, dent-de-lion, and lettuce." But it is a pleasant picture, and if I were as gentle, as patient, and as pure of heart as Cowper was, I might consult Mrs. Beeton to see how to catch a hare (though I read recently that her harecatching remark is apocryphal). There are not many creatures that some affection-rich person has _ not tamed, from the lion of Androcles to the eels of two or three New Zealand

rivers. But I am too far committed already to my own birds and beasts to try further experiments. It probably took the human race hundreds of years to tame dogs. I read only yesterday that the first men to hunt with dogs did it unintentionally: that the dogs were only greedy followers hovering in the background like jackals. It could be true. It certainly ig true that with all their affection for man, and delight in his company, dogs soon revert to savagery if they are abandoned and _ hungry. Farmers look with deep suspicion on the hunting packs of the official rabbitkillers, and I was given a lurid account in Otago recently of a pack that had to be shot to prevent them from eating a rabbiter who had been away on a drinking bout. It is, of course, a big jump from hares to dogs, and I am not suggesting that, if I got drunk and forgot to feed them, pet hares would attack me with teeth and claws. My fears are all for my peace and my garden, since pens and cages are devices of the Devil. * . *& *

APRIL 26

HE incessant crossing and re-crossing of our pets from paddock to paddock makes me think of a remark made

recently. by a visitor from South America-that sheep are the greatest travellers of all mammals. Though all generalisations should be taken with salt, including this one, I can think of more reasons for agreeing with him than

for asking him to say. it again before scientific witnesses. If we exclude

man, the maddest mammalian traveller of all, there can’t be many mammals which have been sent or taken on longer journeys than sheep have made. There are New Zealand sheep in Tibet, English sheep in the heart of Australia, Patagonian sheep in Greenland, and Syrian sheep in the African karoo. Every year or so we send sheep from New Zealand to one of the South American republics. We ship them back and forth to the Chathams. We have dropped them on Campbell Island. Their voluntary journeys are nowadays short, but when the world was wide they wandered as far as natural barriers permitted. What but a wandering gene took my ‘ewes a few weeks ago through good and bad fences to a hill from which they could see the sea? What gives runholders about the same number of stragglers every year whether their fences are new or old? What makes sheep go wild? What makes outlaws of some, isolationists and non-co-operators in spite of the deep-rooted ovine habit of flocking? I think it is a carry-over or a carfying-on of the impulse that moved them out of Central Asia fifty centuries ago-and then, one wet day, made two of them brush past Noah into the ark. * 4 *

APRIL 27

NEIGHBOUR has recently. bought a dog to frighten visitors who have an insatiable desire for chickens. Itghas good teeth, and strong retractile muscles right round its mouth. But its tail and mouth muscles don’t work in harmony. When its teeth are telling you in a ferocious grimace to get out and waste

no time about ‘it, its tail is wagging out a welcome. And I don’t think

the hind end is trying to gain time for the front end. If there is treachery in the wagging it is lost on you when you see the snarling. But I am afraid of savage dogs, and of some that are normally quite harmless: bulldogs and boxers, for example. If I have slept well, and done nothing else to lower my tone, I can usually bluff it gut; but I can’t say, any more than Fitzjames could, that my heart neither races nor misses a beat. The worst moment of all is when a bulldog at someone’s front door insists on snifing .my legs while the owner is talking to me, and having a dull nose, pushes it right against my calves. I sat out a whole dinner once. with a bull-' bitch lying under my chair and sniffing my legs every time they moved. It comforts me a little to recall that Hudson was afraid of dogs, mainly, I think, because of shocks in Patagonia when he was a child. The most horrifying thing I have ever read-I would like to think it the worst thing man has ever done ‘to man-was an account of the execution of a murderer tied to a hurdlg and thrown to dogs to be finished off. (To be continued)