I should look up at Melbury against the blue and white sky and feel my heart skip a beat at it’s high-rise beauty. In may ways indeed I do. But I feel a sense of sadness too because, on it’s lowest slopes the grass is an artificially enhanced luminous green, fenced off with spiky wire and made into a field occupied by cows.
The cows are sitting and ruminating or reaching over a shoulder to lick their back. Some are standing, head down, and grazing. They all wear straps around their necks with some sort of dangling blue plastic medallion. They all have ear tags punched through the skin and display branded identity numbers on their rumps.
Cows are great at converting grass into milk. But what happens to the calves which, curled up and growing inside their mothers’ wombs, are the unavoidable by-product of fat-rich human thirst?
NOTES
- Two Painted Lady butterflies on Graham’s allotment. One on flowering groundsel, the other fluttering over his January King’s.
- A bumblebee working the flowers of borage on Julian and Hannah’s plot.
Copyright, Joe Hashman
Tags: butterfly, cabbage, cow, groundsel, melbury, november, painted lady butterfly