This is day 5 of our 7-day series on the farm characters. So far we have met the cow who always seems to know when something is happening, the escape artist, the self-appointed boss cow and the troublemaker who somehow manages to become involved in whatever is going on. Today, we meet perhaps the most frustrating character of all because there is no obvious explanation for her. She is the cow nobody can quite figure out.
She does not follow the script
Every farmer develops expectations about their cows. You get to know how individual animals tend to behave, where they are usually found and what sort of characters they are. Most of the time, that familiarity makes working with a herd easier because you develop a sense of what to expect.
Then there is the cow who refuses to fit the pattern.
She is not necessarily difficult. She is not necessarily troublesome. She may be perfectly healthy and perfectly ordinary in every measurable respect. But just when you think you have worked out what sort of cow she is, she does something that makes you reconsider the entire theory.
You think you have her figured out.
Then she proves you wrong.
The one that keeps surprising you
Perhaps she is usually one of the first cows to do something, but occasionally decides she would rather be somewhere else. Maybe she is generally predictable until one particular circumstance comes along and changes everything. Perhaps she seems completely uninterested in something that catches every other cow's attention, only to become fascinated by it several days later.
None of these things necessarily mean anything is wrong. Animals are individuals, and behaviour can vary for many ordinary reasons. What makes this particular cow memorable is simply that she does not seem to follow the pattern you have come to expect from her.
For a farmer, that can be oddly fascinating.
You start paying closer attention, not because you are expecting trouble, but because you genuinely want to know what she will do next.
You think you know her
One of the interesting things about farming is how quickly familiarity develops. When you see the same animals repeatedly, you begin to recognise their individual characteristics without consciously trying to memorise them.
You know a cow by the way she looks, the way she carries herself or simply because you have seen her often enough that she becomes familiar. You remember things about her from previous seasons and develop a general sense of what she is like.
That knowledge can be extremely useful.
But occasionally it creates a problem of its own.
You begin to think you have a particular cow completely worked out, and then she does something that does not fit your understanding of her at all.
It can leave you wondering whether you ever knew her in the first place.
Farmers like an explanation
There is something about farming that encourages people to look for reasons. If something changes, you want to know why. If something is not working properly, you want to know what caused it. If an animal behaves differently, it is natural to wonder what is behind it.
Sometimes there is a clear answer.
Sometimes there is not.
The cow nobody can figure out belongs firmly in the second category. You can observe her. You can notice patterns. You can compare what she does from one situation to another. But there may never be a satisfying explanation for why she behaves differently from the way you expected.
And that is okay.
Not every mystery needs solving.
The danger of making assumptions
One of the useful things about having an unpredictable cow around is that she can remind you not to make assumptions too quickly.
If you have seen an animal behave one way repeatedly, it is very easy to assume that is simply what she will always do. Farmers have plenty of experience to draw on, and that experience matters, but animals can still surprise you.
A cow that normally behaves one way can respond differently in another situation. The circumstances may have changed, something in her environment may be different, or there may simply be individual variation that is impossible to explain from the outside.
That does not necessarily make her mysterious in a scientific sense.
It just makes her herself.
The conversations she creates
The cow nobody can figure out can become a regular topic of conversation because everyone seems to have a different theory.
One person has noticed one particular habit. Someone else has seen something completely different. Another person insists that she has always behaved that way. Someone who has only recently started working on the farm cannot understand what everyone is talking about.
Then the cow does something unexpected again.
Suddenly the conversation starts all over.
These discussions are rarely formal. They happen while people are working, walking through the yards or having a quick conversation during the day. They are simply part of the accumulated knowledge that develops when people spend a lot of time around the same animals.
The cow becomes a puzzle nobody is particularly determined to solve.
Sometimes there is no pattern
Farmers are very good at spotting patterns because farming involves observing things repeatedly. You see the same paddocks, the same animals and many of the same routines over and over again. That repetition makes differences noticeable.
But sometimes the pattern is that there is no pattern.
The cow nobody can figure out may behave one way today and another way tomorrow. She may seem completely predictable for weeks and then suddenly do something unexpected. She may fit neatly into one description for a while before doing something that completely contradicts it.
Trying too hard to explain every little difference can make farming more complicated than it needs to be.
Sometimes the most accurate conclusion is simply that she is an individual cow with her own quirks.
Photo by Dianna Malcolm
She becomes memorable
Ironically, the very thing that makes her difficult to understand is what makes her so easy to remember.
People rarely tell stories about the completely predictable cow who did exactly what everyone expected every day. They remember the odd ones. They remember the animals that had something different about them, even if nobody could quite put their finger on what it was.
The cow nobody can figure out becomes one of those animals.
Years later, somebody may mention her and immediately remember the same unanswered questions. They might remember an incident that never quite made sense or a habit that appeared and disappeared without explanation.
Her lack of predictability becomes her defining characteristic.
There is something familiar about the mystery
Perhaps part of the appeal of this character is that farming itself rarely provides all the answers. Farmers make decisions with the information available to them, watch what happens and adjust when necessary. There is always another variable, another change in circumstances or another unexpected development.
The cow nobody can figure out fits rather neatly into that reality.
She reminds us that observation does not always lead to certainty. You can spend years around animals and still have one that surprises you. You can know a herd extremely well and still encounter behaviour that makes you stop and think.
That is not necessarily a failure of knowledge.
Sometimes it is simply a reminder that living things do not always behave according to the neat little categories we create for them.
The cow you never quite forget
Every farm has animals that become memorable for a particular reason. Some are famous for getting out. Some seem to run the herd. Some are always involved when something goes wrong. Then there are the ones who never quite make sense.
The cow nobody can figure out may not have the most dramatic story attached to her. She may never have escaped, caused a major incident or done anything that would make her famous beyond the farm gate. Her story is simply that nobody was ever entirely sure what made her tick.
And perhaps that is enough.
Because farming is full of things that can be measured, recorded and explained, but it is also full of things that are simply observed. Sometimes you know an animal because you have spent enough time around her to recognise her character, even if you could never explain exactly what that character was.
Tomorrow, we turn our attention to a completely different kind of farm character: the quiet one that always gets overlooked, the cow that rarely demands attention but can become surprisingly memorable once you start noticing her. See you tomorrow for day 6 of the farm characters.