Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week Peter writes: Since most of the "how to farm" animal care books we have consulted seem to treat animals as objects, or mere commodities, and thus ignore much of their behavior, we have been left to learn through our own day-to-day observations how their minds work. The thrust of such books is essentially how to raise farm animals to get the biggest dollar return on them, and they somehow overlook the obvious—that farm animals are living, sentient beings that we need to understand, if we are to satisfy their needs and contribute to the quality of their often very short lives. What follows is not a systematic study, rather these are random observations that, bit by bit, are forming our growing body of farm knowledge. I’ll start with our karakul sheep, since after almost ten years of caring for them, we understand them best. Our ewes, when they are ready to give birth, seek the security of the barn, where they were born and raised. Not all of them manage to make it into the barn, but most do, and those that don’t get pretty close. The experienced ones seem to know that they and their newborn will be moved into the luxury of a birthing pen for the first days, and have a sense of entitlement about extra grain treats. The rest of the herd respectfully keeps its distance during the birthing. Once the lamb is born, the ewe tears off the birth sack (and sometimes eats it), severs the umbilical cord, and licks the lamb clean of the birthing fluids. The lamb is immediately up on its long legs, fully coordinated and strong, ready to go. The ewe and lamb are inseparable in the first days. The mother recognizes her lamb not by its appearance, apparently, but by sniffing its behind, which she checks out quite frequently. A ewe will not share her teats with another ewe’s lamb. This we saw as a hard-and-fast rule until, in this last birthing go-around, two ewes and their lambs ended up sharing the same birthing pen and, to our surprise, began co-parenting. How much this is an exception to the rule remains to be seen. If a ewe has given birth to twins and for some reason is having a problem with her milk, we have discovered, she will reject one of them and exclusively feed the other. Nothing, in our experience, will make her nurse the rejected one. If a ewe with a single lamb loses it, she goes through a very human-like grieving process that seems to last at least a week, during which she may isolate herself in a corner of the barn and show no interest in eating or rejoining the herd. The ram, by contrast, seems oblivious that he has had anything to do with producing the lambs and evidences no attachment to them or interest in them. We have come later to breeding cattle and, therefore, know far less about them. While on our various farm ventures, we usually try to stay at least a chapter ahead in our understanding, we actually were forced by unforeseen circumstances to start learning about cow birthing even before we had intended to. This was what we now call the “Virgin Birth,” a bizarre event that took place a few years ago, before we had started breeding our own cattle, when we had only cows and no bull.
One late afternoon in August as I sat in the shade, resting like God on the seventh day surveying his handiwork (but unGod-like relishing my cocktail), I looked down into the cow pasture and noticed the cows scattered about, each separate, in an odd formation, not in their usual cowy herd. Not long after, Mark came running up from the pasture (it was Sunday, his turn to do chores), excitedly announcing the birth of a calf. I was thunderstruck! A calf born to a herd of cows with no bull in evidence anywhere—this was one for the Guiness Book of Records! Or maybe the Bible! After some intense speculation, we remembered that we had boarded the herd the previous winter at a farm in Tivoli because our pastures had run out early, and we had not yet constructed a winter shelter or them...and, yes, there was another herd with a bull on the property, supposedly in a separate pasture. Apparently, we finally deduced, the deed was done there. Having to improvise as we did in this case, our assumption was that what we had learned from going through many birthings with our sheep would apply. But, from the beginning, we should have realized that things were going to be different. The cow, for one, accepted the pasture, not the barn, as the place for the birth. And, while giving the birthing mother space, it appeared that the rest of the herd stationed themselves individually around the pasture, seemingly as sentinels on guard. Once the mother recovered, she seemed, to our dismay, to abandon the calf, going off to graze with the rest of the herd, leaving it sleeping in a clump of tall grass. Unlike lambs, the calf did not get to its feet and trot after its mother. Concerned, we went down to see if we could move the calf to its mother, but even a newborn calf is big and amazingly strong and has a mind of its own, and we could not, despite all of our efforts, bring the calf to its mother. Instead, when she saw our attempts, she came and moved him to another, more secure spot (from her point of view), and went off to graze again, returning periodically to nurse and check on him. And then we began to realize we were seeing a pattern we had previously only associated with deer, whereby the fawn is secreted in a secure spot and the doe comes and goes—behavior unthinkable for a responsible ewe. Pigs are something else, in good part, probably, because of the numerous piglets in a litter. Just prior to farrowing, sows begin to act on their nesting instinct. They begin moving hay, grasses, twigs, whatever is at hand, into their huts carefully putting together a birthing bed. They meticulously grind up with their teeth and feet anything the piglets might get trapped in or tripped up in, and pack down the various materials they have assembled creating a warm, secure place for the piglets. And then, when the time comes, after making these housewifely preparations that are totally foreign to cows or sheep, they stretch out in their nest, and the piglets one after the other begin to emerge. Our record so far: thirteen in one litter. Unlike a cow or sheep, the sow’s mothering is not, however, entirely predictable. A first-time sow may, we discovered to our horror, become confused and eat her own, or a sow perceiving defects in the piglets may also do the same—something unimaginable with sheep and cows. With the high number of piglets in a litter, the kind of individual attention and identification of mother to offspring typical of sheep and cattle is obviously not possible, Nor do sows seem to have the kind of exclusiveness in mothering that sheep and cattle have. A few years ago, for instance, Patty and Laverne, our purebred Ossabaw sows, shared a hut and farrowed a week apart, and as far as we could determine, happily raised their piglets in common.
The competitive world into which piglets are born seems to have given piglets very different instincts. While access to nipples, given the sows' rows of them, is not a problem, the nipples at the front of the sow are the more productive and so highly favored. Instinctively the A-piglets choose and take possession of the front nipples, the runts being left with those in the back. And once this choice has been made, the piglet has exclusive ownership of that nipple. Unlike lambs and more like calves, piglets are not ready to be up and on the move from the beginning, but spend the first days in a comradely heap, snuggled up against the warmth of momma not far from that chosen teat. While the sow is ferociously protective of her piglets, she soon develops a curiously laissez faire attitude about them as they begin making their frisky forays out of the hut and, inevitably, outside the protection of the pen itself. Momma sow makes no effort to keep them with her, and they soon seem to lose the need to be continuously with her, and very quickly begin living more and more independently. If she sees them in danger, momma sow will come charging to their defense, but does not seem to feel that keeping them safely close to her is part of her motherly role. Unlike the long-term attachment of the ewe and cow to their young, the sow’s bonds to her piglets seem to fade away quickly as the piglets become less and less offspring and more and more competitors at the trough. —Peter Davies
