A Cow Named Apple | Life in the Kingdom

Over the past two decades, we’ve kept company with more animals that I can count. Chickens, pigs, sheep, ducks, and, of course, our small herd of cows, never fewer than two, and only occasionally more than five. I love keeping animals, but such a statement can’t come close to expressing what it truly means to care for livestock, nor the species-specific aspects of my affections. For instance, chickens, which I love to eat but don’t particularly enjoy caring for, and which continually vex me in their defenselessness: Once a coon or a weasel gets whiff of your flock, you’re in for carnage and sleeplessness. Last summer, Penny and I passed a full month taking turns sleeping in a tent alongside our meat birds to protect them from a family of hungry raccoons.

The livestock I love most is cows. Cows embody the qualities I’m continually striving for but which always seem dispiritingly beyond my reach. They are the least complaining of the creatures we’ve kept; equanimity is a defining bovine characteristic, with only rare exceptions relating to failures in my husbandry (if I’m late with their morning hay, for instance). Generally speaking, if you keep a cow in feed and water, you’ve got a happy cow, come rain, sleet, wind, or sun. I suppose the same could be said of pigs, but to me, there’s an undercurrent of malcontent with even the most amenable hog, as if it’s just waiting for you to turn your back before it charges through the fence and into the woods on a multiday escapade. Maybe it’s those beady porcine eyes.

We got our first cows when Penny was eight months pregnant with our second son, Rye. It was a mother-daughter pair, with the mother having given birth nine weeks earlier, and arriving with the expectation of being milked twice daily. The hubris was stunning, really: to think we deemed ourselves capable of taking on so much at once. A new large animal species, a daily milking routine, and, oh yeah, almost forgot, a second newborn child. Today it seems laughable, even foolish. It is also one of the most rewarding decisions we ever made.

We named the heifer calf Apple. I can’t remember how we settled on that name, but I suspect our son Fin—who was not quite 3 at the time—had something to do with it. She was a lively little beast, a Jersey-Devon cross with coltish energy and uncommonly enormous eyes that, owl-like, seemed capable of seeing in all directions at once.

Apple grew into a fine yearling, and when the time came, we had our neighbor Melvin breed her. Melvin was well practiced in the art of artificial insemination, having been a dairy farmer for much of his 60-ish years. He even kept a tank of semen in his milking parlor, and offered us our choice of breeds. I’m pretty sure we chose Angus, thinking we’d raise the calf for the freezer.

What we didn’t know about Apple—what we couldn’t have known—was that despite her gentleness with humans and other adult cattle, she was entirely unsuited to mothering. So unsuited, in fact, that she actually stomped her first calf to death before I was able to intervene. Once more we chose a course of action that in hindsight seems imbued with naïveté, if not downright hubris: We bred her again.

Predictably, Apple never became a contender for mother of the year. Although we saved her subsequent offspring from the horrendous fate of that first calf, it’s only because we were willing to sleep on stacks of hay come freshening time, so we could snatch her newborns away before she started rampaging. She refused to nurse even a single one of the nine calves she gave us over the years. We bottle-fed them all.

Anyone in their right minds would have sent Apple packing. Infanticide is simply not a tenable trait in a species whose primary purpose is to produce offspring. Yet in every other way, she was exemplary. She was exceedingly tolerant of the boys, who would sometimes splay themselves across the broad expanse of her back as she lay basking in the pasture. She suffered no health issues, and thrived on a grain-free diet. And her milk was like nothing I’d ever seen: A half-gallon jar of milk yielded a full quart of cream so thick that once it set up in the fridge overnight, it would not pour from a wide-mouth Mason jar.

So we kept at it, year after year after year, until it became apparent that Apple was getting past her prime. Or maybe we were getting past ours. Those nights of half-sleep in the barn while awaiting the arrival of her calf, and then the frantic scurry to snatch the poor little thing out from under her, started feeling a bit too much.

This would have been the second time that any real farmer would’ve put Apple on a truck, bound for auction, or simply put her down and stuck her in the freezer. But this was a cow who’d allowed our toddler sons to lie on her back. She’d given us nine calves, innumerable gallons of milk, pounds of butter, quarts of yogurt. For a dozen years, barely a day had passed that I hadn’t stood with her for a few minutes, scratching her favorite spots, like the one at the base of her tail. She’d let me scratch until my fingers ached. This was a girl who’d earned a comfortable retirement, and so a comfortable retirement is what she got.

One morning I found her lying on her side. It was cold, and she was shaking. I don’t know how long she’d been lying there, but it’d probably been hours. A friend helped us get her back on her feet, and she seemed fine. She was eating and drinking and walking around as usual, and we chalked it up to a fluke. Until it happened again, just a few days later, and this time, no amount of prodding would get her off the ground. I got the tractor and tried to hoist her up with the bucket loader, but she was having none of it. She wasn’t distressed; she just sat there, slowly chewing her cud, looking at us through those enormous eyes. Truth is, I think she knew it was time.

When you keep livestock for any length of time, you’re committing to kill. Oh, sure, you can delegate the act itself, but don’t kid yourself: You’re still implicated. It’s still your responsibility. It’s really just a question of whose finger is on the trigger. In our 20 years of living with animals, I’ve had my finger on the trigger, and I’ve paid others to have their finger on the trigger, and though it’s difficult no matter what, I guess for me it’s harder to hire it done.

So we sat there for a while with Apple, saying our good-byes, knowing the truth of what we had to do. But wanting to put it off for just a few minutes more.