Wild life | 28 June 2018

Laikipia, Kenya

A minotaur head glowers at me through the bathroom window while I am brushing my teeth in the morning. It’s George the bull, who wants his ears scratched. After I get dressed, it’s time to select a cattle stick, known here as a finbo, from an umbrella stand stuffed with crooks, wands, withies, shillelagh-like cudgels and rods that a biblical prophet might have forgotten had he come to supper. I choose my favourite, a finbo that balances perfectly in the hand like a drum major’s malacca cane. Outside, a Jersey bullock is sprawled on the garden path, chewing the cud. I open the gate, passing under the skull of a long-horned beast, striding out among the paddocks where the weaners keen for their lost mothers, where the stirks and the mavericks are already grazing in the morning. At the crush the cowhands are preparing mobs of stores and culls to be weighed. Hundreds of cattle are bellowing and the din is immense. Some of the men are nicknamed after their favourite bulls. Several have been up all night in the boma with the herds. Others will stay out tending the livestock in the hot sun, guarding against lions and rustlers. As we begin weighing and dosing for worms, I look at the hillsides beyond the ranch boundaries where my Samburu neighbours are letting their cattle out. Thousands of animals sprinkle white and brown across the green. We are inhabiting a bloody eclogue. Everybody here loves cattle. It is what an anthropologist once dubbed ‘udder madness’. I was always destined for this. A long time ago my ancestors rieved the cattle of the Scots. I am told we were once butchers in Yorkshire. My father was a judge at cattle shows. My mother had a herd of South Devons. At last cattle have become an obsession for me too, while many of the interests I once pursued have faded.