Cow: A Bovine Biography by Florian Werner

Author:Florian Werner [Werner, Florian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Technology & Engineering, Nature, Animals, Mammals, Natural History; NATURE; Animals; Mammals, Animal Husbandry, Agriculture, Folklore & Mythology, Agriculture & Food
ISBN: 9781553659808
Publisher: Greystone Books
Published: 2011-10-21T07:32:14+00:00

Thomas Gainsborough’s Landscape with a Woodcutter and Milkmaid (1755, oil on canvas, private collection) shows how the bucolic ideal permeated visual art.

Like the legendary song of the Sirens, Kühreihen brought death to those who heard them. Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau commented on the magic powers of these folk songs in his Dictionary of Music. Romantic composers like Robert Schumann, Felix Mendelssohn, and Richard Wagner paid homage to them in their musical works. And the poets Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano included a song about a soldier who follows the lure of the alpenhorn but is then court-martialed and shot, in their collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The youth’s magical horn). It spread the myth of the fatal powers of Kühreihen and made them popular beyond Swiss borders: “Do not spare my young life / Shoot me so the blood splashes out / This I beg of you.”

Such pathos was probably a rather alien concept for writer Heinrich Heine, who referred to himself as the last Romantic poet and had, as he saw it, “dealt the heaviest blows to the meaning of Romantic poetry in Germany.” His poem “Epilogue” is also about last things, and cow herding plays a role in it as well. However, things here are decidedly this-worldly and robust in the best sense of the word:

Graves they say are warm’d by glory

Foolish words and empty story!

Better far the warmth we prove

From a cowgirl deep in love

With her arms around us flung

Reeking with the smell of dung.

In contrast to “Das Kchühorn” and the “Emmenthaler Kühreihen,” the cow here doesn’t keep the lovers apart but is the link between them. She is only indirectly present through the fragrance of her excretions. But it’s just that aroma that gives the imagined rendezvous with the milkmaid its special spice. For one thing, it makes the “foolish words” of the first line of the poem—the pathetic cliché that glory will outlive us and make even death more bearable—look particularly cold and stale.

The smell of cow dung might not seem particularly pleasant, let alone exciting. We have to remember, though, that that fragrance was a lot more popular in the nineteenth century than it is now. With hygiene in the cowsheds not being up to today’s standards, the nourishing and sought-after cow products had an aroma that we would find rather strange. Even at the beginning of the twentieth century, dairy specialist trainees who took part in a blind taste test of milk deemed it tasty only when a pinch of cow dung had been mixed in. In the old days, the smell of bestial excrement was considered so beneficial that some sanatoriums had their own cowsheds in which ailing city dwellers could expose themselves to the healthy fragrances of country life in order to speed up recovery.

In fact, the fragrance may well have had a strong sexual appeal back then. During the winter people often slept with the animals to keep warm. They bedded themselves down next to the cows’ plump and hefty bodies; children were fathered and born in their presence.

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