An ‘Egghead Neuroscientist’ Tries His Hand At Cattle Farming

The following is an excerpt from Cowpuppy: An Unexpected Friendship and a Scientist’s Journey Into the Secret World of Cows by Gregory Berns.

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Cowpuppy: An Unexpected Friendship and a Scientist's Journey Into the Secret World of Cows

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The cows were supposed to make life easier. They had but one job on the farm and that was to eat grass. I should have realized that managing a herd of cattle was more complicated than simply putting them out to pasture. Ranchers say you can—and should—eat your mistakes, but that was not my way of thinking. For better or worse, the cows were part of the family.

The calf was the first clue that farming was going to be a lot harder than I ever imagined. She lay beneath the lower fence rail. Her front legs were tucked under her brisket, giving her the appearance of a sphinx. Her emotions, if any, were as inscrutable as her Egyptian counterpart. The momma, a black-and-white miniature zebu, glowered at me while she stood sentry over her calf. The little one had been licked clean and was completely absent of any blood or mucus. As the sun set behind a stand of loblolly pines, it cast a golden aura upon the calf, making her fur shimmer in a beautiful shade of chestnut. She had the most adorable white splotch between her eyes, just like her daddy, a bull we had named Ricky Bobby.

I blinked my eyes hard and said to my wife, Kathleen, “Do you see this?”

She nodded and said, “What do we do now?”

To say that we were novice farmers would have given us more credit than we were due. On a COVID pandemic-driven impulse, just six months before, we had picked up and moved from Atlanta to a property forty miles south with visions of starting a self-sustaining farm. The cows were the most recent addition to our growing menagerie. I suppose we should have taken the seller’s warning more seriously when he delivered the herd and pointed to the black-and-white cow’s udder, telling us we would have a surprise soon—a surprise that now lay on the edge of the pasture in the rapidly fading light. But what’s a farm without cows? They were going to be the critical element in my grand vision to grow food without the addition of chemicals like fertilizer and herbicides. The cows would graze happily on acres of grass and make manure, which we would compost and turn into the food garden. It would be a glorious cycle of life—or, more precisely, nitrogen. But the cows were becoming much more than mere cogs in the nitrogen cycle. Their cognitive and emotional intelligence was manifesting in ways I hadn’t thought possible, forming social bonds that were as strong as the dogs for whom our farm was named.

Talking Dogs Farm was so named because I had spent the last decade of my career as a neuroscientist studying how dogs think. The Dog Project had begun as the half-baked idea of trying to teach my dog Callie to lie still in an MRI scanner so that I could see what she was really thinking. It grew into something much larger, showing how dogs love us, how they see and hear the world, and even which dogs are destined to become good service dogs. I would soon ask these same sorts of questions of the cows. The calf, though, commanded our immediate attention.

“We can’t leave her here,” I replied to Kathleen. “The coyotes will get her.”

“Call Ken. He’ll know what to do.”

Pastor Ken and his wife, Boni, were our closest neighbors. Distances in the country were considered on a different scale than in the city. By an urban metric, we didn’t have any neighbors, at least none that you could see. Out here, close meant anybody within a couple of miles. Ken had lived in the area most of his life and had spent his teen years working on a dairy farm. He knew cows. And even though Kathleen and I had moved to the country just six months before, I felt as though I had been here for years and Ken had been my neighbor for as long as I could remember.

Ken picked up right away. I told him about the calf, and he said he would be right over.

As I looked at our new addition, I felt a connection and responsibility rivaling what I had felt when my children were born. The calf made real how much I had changed. I was becoming—had become—a different person. It wasn’t just the hard work of farming that was physically transforming me. I was beginning to see my new home in rural Georgia through the eyes of the people on whom I now depended. History ran deep here. So deep that even a conversation about cows and pastures was like an onion, peeling back the layers of everything that had been done to a piece of land and who had done it.

I cradled the calf and carried her toward the barn. The umbilical cord, raw and pink, left a gooey trail on my shirt. I vaguely remembered something about the importance of the mother’s first milk, called colostrum, and that the calf needed to get that in her gut right away. Instinctively, I felt that calf and momma should remain together undisturbed so that the newborn could get all the milk she wanted without the other cows getting in the way.

The calf must have weighed twenty or thirty pounds, and my clothes were drenched in sweat by the time I got to the barn, just as Ken was pulling up. “Oh, she’s a beaut,” he crooned. “What a gorgeous little calf.”

She replied by letting out a feeble moo that sounded like a wet fart.

With the calf safe in the barn stall, I thought Lucy, her momma, would come right away. Not so. Bellowing in great distress, Lucy kept circling around the area where I’d found her baby. This only agitated the other cows, who began stampeding in circles too. My daughter, Madeline, home from college, heard the commotion and joined us. With Ken’s help, the four of us fanned out into the pasture and slowly began working the cows up toward the barn. It was not like I had seen in the movies. No cowboys or horses or cattle dogs— just four people moving methodically through waist-high grass, applying psychological pressure from a distance to the cows’ personal space. It was exhausting. Just when we would get them close to the barn, one of them would spook; the herd would run back to where the calf had been born, and we would have to start all over again.

On about the third try, we coaxed Lucy through the barn gate, which Ken was able to swing shut before the other two cows went through. Ricky Bobby lowed in protest, but I paid him no attention. The mother cow quickly found her newborn calf in the stall. I closed the door and exhaled in relief. The momma licked her calf furiously.

“You’re a cattleman now!” Ken exclaimed.

Only then did I notice that Ken was wearing a back brace. I made a mental note to ask him about that later.

In the morning, momma and calf were exactly where I had left them. I couldn’t tell if the calf had moved at all. The temperature was seventy-five degrees and rising on what would be another humid summer day in Georgia. The calf stared at me with dull, sunken eyes.

Kathleen, always the nurse, reminded me that newborn babies experience large fluid shifts and can go from looking like the Michelin tire man to prune creatures in the first day. Still, we hadn’t seen the calf nurse, and she was now twelve hours old. The window for colostrum was closing.

The local farm supply sold powdered colostrum. It wasn’t as good as the real thing, but not knowing what else to do, Kathleen ran out to pick some up, along with the necessary equipment for administering it. I stayed home and watched YouTube videos on how to bottle-feed a newborn calf.

Cows are ruminants. This means that their digestive systems are highly adapted to extracting nutrients from grasses that other animals can’t eat. A horse, although a natural grazer, is not a ruminant and requires food much higher in nutrient quality, like oats and grain and alfalfa. Whereas a horse has one big stomach, a cow’s is divided into four compartments, each specialized for a different part of the digestive process. The biggest chamber is called the rumen and acts like a giant fermentation tank. After a cow consumes a large quantity of grass, the partially chewed plant material sits in the rumen, where bacteria begin to break it down. Later, when the cow is relaxing, she will burp up the larger pieces, rechew them, mix the material with a large amount of saliva, and swallow the cud again for further breakdown in the rumen. When the food particles are small enough, the second compartment— the reticulum— passes the material to the omasum, where water is absorbed. The fourth chamber— the abomasum— functions similarly to the human stomach and breaks the food down into components that the small intestine can absorb.

A newborn calf, however, is unable to digest grass or hay. It does not have a functioning rumen because it doesn’t have any bacteria in it yet. Like all other mammals, the calf needs its mother’s milk to survive and grow, but the complexity of the cow’s digestive anatomy means that you can’t just give a calf a bottle. If milk goes into the rumen, it won’t get absorbed, so it needs to land in the omasum. The path of the food is determined by how the calf holds its head. If the head is tilted up, the milk has a straight shot from mouth to omasum. When the head is tilted down for grazing, food goes into the rumen.

To bottle-feed a calf, you need to tilt the calf ’s head up and hold the bottle above its head. If that doesn’t work, the alternative is to pass a tube down its throat and deliver the milk directly to the omasum. The YouTube videos did not instill any confidence in my ability to do this.

A normal-sized calf weighs sixty to eighty pounds, but because our cows were miniature sized, so was the calf. Kathleen had wisely picked up a bottle and nipple sized for a goat instead of a cow.

The calf stared blankly at me with logy eyes and didn’t put up any resistance when I picked her up. Lucy paced nervously. Kathleen tilted up the calf ’s head with one hand and jammed the bottle into her mouth. The calf did nothing. Kathleen tried squeezing the nipple, but the milk just dribbled out. The calf just wouldn’t suckle.

After an hour of futile attempts to get some milk into the calf, we decided to leave her alone for a bit. Maybe natural instinct would kick in and momma and calf would do their thing. It was also possible that this was Lucy’s first calf and she, too, was a bit confused about what was supposed to happen. Either way, time was running out to get some colostrum into the calf. After twenty-four hours, her digestive system wouldn’t absorb the crucial antibodies, leaving her wide open to a range of pathogens that could kill her in hours.

We were out of ideas. With nothing to lose, Kathleen put out an SOS on the local Facebook page: Need help getting newborn calf to nurse.

There is nothing like an animal in distress to marshal the forces. Within the hour, the page was filled with suggestions and offers of frozen milk. But what we really needed was hands-on instruction by someone who knew what they were doing. There were several cattle farms in the area, so the expertise was here. But the farmers were probably busy tending to their own animals, not monitoring their Facebook feeds.

By early afternoon, the temperature had climbed into the eighties, and the calf was showing obvious signs of dehydration. I called Doc Chanda, one of the two local cow vets, but she was busy and couldn’t make a house call. I would have to bring the calf to her if I wanted her help. I didn’t even have a truck, and the thought of loading a calf in the back seat of my car seemed like a disaster in the making. We would have to make that decision soon if we were to get the calf to the vet before she closed for the day.

Kathleen’s phone rang from an unknown number. Before moving to the country, we would never answer calls unless they were from people in our contact lists. Good thing she picked up this time.

It was the local farrier, a horseshoer named Crowley. Someone up the road, who happened to be having their horses shod, had told him about Kathleen’s post. Crowley said he might be able to help.

An hour later, he pulled up in a beat-up truck. He climbed out, stroked his salt-and-pepper beard, and said, “Well, let’s see what you got.”

The calf was in the same corner she had been since we had put her in the stall. Momma stood balefully, as confused as I was.

“And she hasn’t nursed?” Crowley asked.

“Not that we’ve seen,” I said. “And she won’t take the bottle.”

“Is the cow kicking her off?”

“No,” I replied. “She just stands there, unsure what to do.”

Crowley nodded. “Lemme give it a try.”

I handed him the bottle, which was now sticky with dried milk. “You’ve done this before?”

Crowley shrugged. “Not with cows, but I have a herd of sheep.”

The calf looked at us weakly as we entered the stall. Lucy snorted.

Like a professional wrestler, Crowley put the calf in a headlock and sat down in the straw, backing the calf ’s rear into the corner so she had no place to go. He lifted his forearm until the calf ’s muzzle was tipped up at a forty-five-degree angle and jammed the bottle into her mouth.

Both Kathleen and I gasped in amazement as the calf started sucking. It was almost involuntary as the combination of proper head angle and nipple in the mouth triggered the suckling reflex. I could see immediately why our efforts had failed. The calf needed to be in a position that duplicated that of sucking from beneath her momma’s udder.

She drained the bottle in less than a minute and actually put up a bit of resistance when Crowley removed it from her mouth. Already her eyes sparked with more life. Crowley spritzed a little of the leftover milk on Lucy’s teats and nudged the calf in the direction of her udder. She sniffed a teat and got the milk scent. The calf immediately latched on and began sucking vigorously. She gulped audibly, indicating the milk was flowing.

Lucy’s demeanor changed too. The tension seemed to melt out of her body, and she arched her head around and began licking the calf as she nursed.

I was well familiar with the effects of the maternal hormone oxytocin from both medical school and years of studying social bonding in humans and dogs, but never had I seen such a dramatic and instantaneous demonstration of its effects. Oxytocin would have been released in high concentrations during birth, but if the calf hadn’t nursed, then the hormone’s effects would have waned to the point that Lucy might have rejected her newborn entirely. Then we would have had to bottle-feed the calf for at least six months. In that respect, baby cows are just like baby humans. They need milk every few hours. Thank God we didn’t have to go down that road.

Ken popped his head into the stall and beamed at the sight of a newborn calf suckling her momma. “Congratulations to the new father!”

“More like godfather,” I corrected.

“True, true.” He laughed. “That calf is quite the fighter.”

“A warrior,” I said as the name dawned on me. “Xena, the warrior princess.”

Crowley, his work done, dusted off his pants and headed back to his truck, refusing any payment for his time. He opened the cab door with a creak and paused. “What do you plan to do with the herd?”

I shrugged. “They’re for pasture management so I don’t have to cut grass.” Crowley shook his head. “They’re not dairy cows, and they’re not beef cattle. Pretty soon you’re going to have a real herd on your hands.” He climbed in the truck and added, “Good luck!”

I wasn’t sure what he meant by a “real herd,” but as I watched Crowley drive away, a heavy feeling settled in my stomach. What was I going to do with the cows?

The birth of that first calf changed everything. It set me on a course that would ultimately cause me to see cattle from a whole new perspective. It was also the beginning of a journey that forced me to change my relationship to the land and community that gave sustenance to me and the animals. The cows’ role will not likely make sense to most farmers and cattlemen, but maybe by the end of the telling of this journey, all readers— city slickers and country dwellers alike— will see cows in a different light, if only a little bit.

The story begins with how an egghead neuroscientist, who knew nothing about agriculture, ended up on a farm with a bunch of cows.

Taken from Cowpuppy by Gregory Berns. Copyright © 2024 by Gregory Berns Used by permission of Harper Horizon, an imprint of HarperCollins Focus, LLC. www.harpercollinsfocus.com/