Our neighbours have a cow called Sugar who is a particularly pretty cow. She has a cream coat with a scattering of black spots. Every year, she has a beautiful calf the colour of an old red farm barn. Sometimes, I go and look at them over the fence. Sugar looks back but I wouldn’t go as far as saying we have a relationship. She has certainly never in any way indicated that she would appreciate me cuddling her.
Of course she hasn’t. That would be silly. Who in their right mind would contemplate cuddling a cow? For one thing, they are enormous. For another, they will charge you as soon as look at you. Forget all that looking at you with their big soppy eyes framed by eyelashes to rival a mascara model. They are well known for being unpredictable. And for kicking when they’re in a mood.
Somehow, though, cow cuddling is an actual thing. At Dumble Farm, in East Yorkshire, you can pay £50 to spend three hours bonding with bovines with names like Soft Face and Meredith.
Cow cuddling originated in the Netherlands, although it is not known whether it started with people getting stoned on Ecstasy and breaking into paddocks and getting soppy with cattle beasts.
It sounds like an insane idea to me, but it seems there is dosh to be had. I am always keen on any idea on how to turn Lush Places from a money guzzler – last year it cost almost $650 in gas just to mow the lawns – into a money spinner. I could get a cow and charge the equivalent of £50 to let people cuddle it. I could call it Cuddles, which is a terrible pun, but also kind of cute.
I have to do something to make some money. The Lush Places Petting Zoo is still under construction, six years on. What I really want to do is to somehow catch the two golden hares I saw boxing each other’s ears the other day in what we grandly call Hyde Park. They would be an undoubted drawcard. Who would not like to see a pair of golden hares? I’m uncertain as to how you could train them to put on little boxing gloves and stage a boxing show, but if you can train a cow to be cuddled there must be a way to train hares to box.
It takes, apparently, about five months to train a cow to be cuddled. I was unable to find a manual on how to actually do this, but my best guess is that it likely involves hay.
If I had a pair of hares, I could, while giving tours of the Petting Zoo, say in a plummy accent, “Here, a pair of hares.” I haven’t the foggiest idea why I think that’s so amusing but I do.
The chances of catching the hares are slight. The cats saw the hares and started stalking them. The hares looked at the cats looking at them. A cats vs hares fight appeared imminent. It was. The hares turned on the cats and chased them across Hyde Park. The cats wisely skedaddled and the hares went back to boxing each other’s ears. Do not mess with a hare. I am fairly certain they would not take kindly to being cuddled. They’d box your ears.
Cuddling cows is supposed to be therapeutic. I’d rather sniff the roses. Sniffing roses is therapeutic. I have always gardened but I came late to roses. Roses, I thought, were horrible thorny, disease-ridden things. A very good gardener once said to me, “You’ll grow into them”, which I bridled at. “Superior cow,” I thought.
The superior cow proved right. I have grown into roses. The house is full of vases of the most fragrant of the old roses in my garden. It is the Gallica rose, Duchesse de Montebello, a delicate shell pink beauty that smells ambrosial. It has been beloved in gardens since 1829, so the odds are that it just might outlast the fad for cow cuddling.
