Do Cows Appreciate Poetry? And Other Musings On Our Bovine Friends
These creative fieldnotes on encounters with and lessons from feedlot cattle is part of the Companion Species series, which investigates a complex, interconnected, and co-constituted web of beyond-human relating. Series editors: Tessa Archambault, Dylan Couch, Kuhelika Ghosh, Ellie Kincaid, and Bri Meyer.
Prologue: How This Story Came To Be
I wasn’t trying to get too close. But my walks always took me past the place: a feedlot with a few hundred head of cattle owned by the nearby state college—animals contained in iron bars, fattened on corn, examined for science, and sold for cheap meat.
I tried not to look too carefully at the young steers. Their captivity didn’t bear thinking about.
Then, one evening while I was reveling in the glorious Dakota sunset, I finally turned to them. The tune I’d been humming to myself turned into a song I sang aloud, and the animals listened to me. From then on, it was impossible to pass them without saying hello, and impossible to savor the prairie wind and stars without thinking about those creatures.
I found myself going to the feedlot regularly. I found a human friend who didn’t think my new pastime was crazy, and sometimes we’d visit the cattle together and read them poetry. I looked forward to the hour when the feedlot employees went home and I could read to the cows in the quiet, scratch their foreheads, and feed them handfuls of grass. I soon found myself writing and sketching about my new friends.
You know them, too. Maybe you’ve driven past creatures like them a thousand times, or perhaps you only come near cattle when they are wrapped in plastic in a freezer case. Either way, theirs is a story that deserves to be heard.
This isn’t an ethical or academic argument against confined livestock operations. This is a story about some cattle.
The Cattle
There are a few hundred “head” of them, as they say, but there are also a few hundred warm bodies and doe-brown eyes and velvet noses and flicking tails. There are only a dozen steers whom I can get near without having to climb through barbed wire, so I get to know those twelve.
I came to realize there is more vibrancy to these animals’ lives than I imagined there would be.
The steers stand up and walk toward me when they see me coming across the field. They know something is going to happen when I arrive. How often does anything happen in their lives?
The big creatures quiver and stamp, and I’m not sure if I frighten or excite them. Even if I scare them, I think, at least they’re getting some stimulation.
Touch
After a few visits, I see the animals’ personalities emerge. The numbers on their ear tags help me tell them apart, but I soon start giving them names. The biggest white steer and the red one—Leucas (number 61) and Ferris (number 47)—are bold and curious. The two black steers hang back, but they watch me closely.
Number 121—I call him Ami—quickly becomes a special friend. He’s always the first to greet me, and he lets me rub his cheek. When I see my little human hand next to his massive head and muscular jaw, I’m awed that such a powerful animal allows me to touch him. Still, I shove down my revulsion at touching someone so covered in manure and urine. I can wash my hands later. Everyone needs to be touched.
An Ecosystem
Summers are hot here, and recently, each one is hotter than the last. I walk down the gravel road to the feedlot. The cattle see me and amble in my direction.
“Hello, friends. I see you. I see you,” I say.
Hello cattle.
Hello cowbirds, glibly picking insects out of the feedlot’s muck.
Hello flies, tormenting the cattle, laying eggs in the manure.
Hello lichen, inexplicably growing on the iron fence railings.
Hello microbes, listening from inside the steers’ guts.
It’s easy to forget that there is an ecosystem here, too, even though this place was designed to eliminate all life that is not “profitable.”
I pull my knees to my chest and watch the cowbirds bouncing through the muck among the cattle. I wonder if the steers feel envy as they watch the little birds stretch their wings and fly into the wide Dakota sky.
Research
Ami and Midas (Number 094) push their rubbery tongues across the iron bars, licking at the grass just beyond the fence but unable to tear it from the ground. I rip up some grass and feed it to them—an insultingly small offering, a pitiful attempt to apologize for my species’ violation of theirs.
The six red angus steers in the northern lot each have a circular, plastic porthole, a cannula, surgically implanted into their left abdominal walls, and two plastic tubes protruding from their right sides.
I think about the college students who get the “opportunity” to reach inside a steer’s rumen once or twice in their four years of classes on livestock management, and I think about the veterinarians who cut a hole in the steers’ sides and sew their rumens to their abdominal wall. I wonder how much pain the cattle are in once the local anesthetic wears off. I wonder if anyone who works here recognizes these animals’ pain.
Number 095 stands back from the herd, dirty fluid leaking from the cannula in his side. Number 245 has a tube protruding from his flank that oozes yellow pus and is crusted with manure.
How could their bodies not constantly be infected in a place like this?
I don’t know bovine body language well enough to interpret a steer’s pain signals, and there are very few people I would trust to tell me what to look for. I’ve heard the phrase, “Don’t worry; it doesn’t hurt them,” too many times.
Poetry
I usually read to the cattle when I visit them. Who knows if they like it? But they almost always stay by the fence and listen.
I read them poems by Mary Oliver:
I don’t want you just to eat and be content. I want you to walk out into the fields […]
I want you to stand there, far from the white tablecloth.
I want you to fill your hands with the mud, like a blessing.
I read them words of Marcus Aurelius:
It is in our power to grow again to that which is near to us, and again to become a part which helps to make up the whole.”
I read them verses by Wendell Berry:
When they want you to buy something they will call you. When they want you to die for profit they will let you know. So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute.
Am I really sitting here, trying to radicalize a bunch of cattle through poetry? Am I trying to radicalize myself?
Most of the steers eventually wander away, but Ami stands by the fence and watches me. His eyes are dark and wide and unfathomable. I rub his head in his favorite spot.
Rain
It’s pouring rain this morning. I savor the beat of the water on my roof, and I want to pull the covers tight around me and stay in bed. But the rain might not last long, and I need to know what a rainy day is like in the feedlot.
Even the rain can’t wash away the reek of ammonia as I approach the lot; if anything, the stench is stronger.
Today, I notice how the engineers of this place have built earthen dikes around the edges to ensure the feedlot’s toxic run-off doesn’t wash onto the surrounding land. I take running leaps across the ditches rapidly filling with muddy rainwater. The corrals are sloped so that the side where I stand is nothing but a moat of liquid feces and mud.
The cattle are huddled at the high end of the lot, where the mud is not quite so slippery. I’m both touched and dismayed to see the animals wading toward me through the sludge. Number 61 seems to have gained some energy from the rain; he prances across the lot and skids to a stop in the opaque liquid. Do they prefer this downpour to the brutal heat and fly-bites of sunny days?
Maybe the steers know that electric fences don’t work well in rain, because today, several of the animals are testing the wire by nudging it with their noses. They want so badly to push their heads between the railings and feast on the grass growing just on the other side. Usually, the electric wire prevents them. Maybe today it won’t.
Slaughter
Every time I round the corner to the feedlot, I’m briefly afraid that the steers won’t be there.
I know that one day, I’ll arrive and the pens will be empty. I know it will be soon. I know their lives are cut short out of efficient necessity: their bodies can’t handle this kind of abuse for longer than the few months it takes to fatten them for slaughter.
Perhaps all I can wish is to stay engaged with this world, even when change feels impossible.
I wonder what I’ll feel on the day they disappear, knowing they’re on their way to the killing floor.
A part of me thinks I should be relieved, knowing their suffering is brief. Yet I look into their eyes, and they are so alive. And despite everything they experience, I think they love being alive. I think they endure their confinement as best they can and feel the same apprehensive hope for tomorrow that I do.
I want them to live.
Cages
When I was in college, I volunteered with a prison ministry for a day. Inside the penitentiary, I met a man younger than myself—a kid, really. I was on crutches at the time, and when the young man asked me what had happened, I explained how I’d stupidly jumped off a tree branch 12 feet above the ground and landed with a damning crunch.
The boy’s eyes shifted to some place far away. “I used to climb trees,” he told me. “Now I try to look over the prison wall at the trees growing behind it. They don’t have trees in the yard here. I miss trees….”
What response could I possibly give to that?
I wonder how much longer we have to endure this kind of world.
Later, a friend asked me if I’d felt afraid inside the prison. Inside—with all the criminals, is what she meant. But, I did feel afraid: terrified of witnessing the prisoners’ pain, the knife of separation they constantly endure.
Perhaps that same fear is what kept me from getting to know the feedlot cattle for so long. Is there any animal who is not terrified of a cage?
Freedom
I will never offer any defense for the industrial feedlot system of food production. I believe it is one of the most horrific things we do to other living beings. And still, I came to realize there is more vibrancy to these animals’ lives than I imagined there would be.
These cattle are not numb shells of creatures. They are alive. They are invested in their relationships and interested in their surroundings. Their world is so constrained, yet they stay engaged in life.
It makes me think differently about my own life. I am so much freer than these steers. I have the privileges of making choices and touching green grass and seeking shade and drinking clean water. And still, my life is constrained. Still, what I consider my “freedom” is really a set of choices laid before me by biology, culture, government, and circumstance. We all live in cages, of one kind or another. We all spend much of our lives in waiting.
The more time I spend with these cattle, the more kinship I feel with them. I suspect we think the same kinds of thoughts. I suspect we have many of the same anxieties and griefs and joys.
The reality of the confined livestock industry, like so many other things, often feels hopeless to me, too big to dismantle. Imagine how much more hopeless the industrial food system must appear to these cattle, and yet they still choose to be interested in their own lives! Perhaps all I can wish is to stay engaged with this world, even when change feels impossible, even when the choices before me are laughable.
Perhaps no one has ever been exactly free. I want to live my own life deeply nonetheless.
The Stampede
When it gets too dark to read, I close my book and say goodnight to the steers. I walk home through the twilight.
In my mind, a scene plays out. In my mind, I imagine the animals storming the fence, trampling the iron bars into the mud.
I imagine them smashing the expensive skid-loaders as they stampede through the feedlot, as they lead their hundreds of brothers out into the deep grassy fields under the red clouds. I imagine their long tails swishing through the reeds as they lumber down to the marsh and drink deeply, the water fresher than anything they’ve ever tasted.
I imagine them running in a trembling herd west to the Rocky Mountains, or north deep into Canada, or to anywhere left in this world where there are no people to round them up.
Maybe I imagine myself as one of the stampede. Maybe in another version of this story, I am the one doing all of these things.
The gravel road is quiet as I make my way back home. The sky stretches endlessly large overhead, the one part of Dakota that we have not been able to tame.
I walk away from these friends of mine, because I can. When my bare feet touch soft grass, I feel sick with shame. I wonder how much longer we have to endure this kind of world.
Featured Image: Feedlot cattle the author befriended. Photo by the author, 2024.
Mia Werger earned her bachelor’s degrees in Biology and Environmental Studies from Augustana University in South Dakota, where she became fascinated by the global agricultural industry. Conducting research with farmers around North America through the Ecdysis Foundation gave her an eye-opening view into the realities of our food system. Mia currently works as a wilderness trail guide and EMT in northern Minnesota. More of her art and story telling projects can be found on Instagram. Contact.
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