A History According to Cattle

A History According to Cattle
Terike Haapoja

In the beginning there’s a void. A void between us and history, between words and our muted existence. How to cross this void when language is by definition something we don’t possess? You think that because of your writing you are the author of the world, but you’re wrong. You were just an accident like the rest of us, floating in the sea of time. Everybody tries to explain the world. Even the stone, with its stony reasoning, finds order in its rocky little world. You are nothing special. There’s an inside to everything. But here I am, with my horns and tail and compartmented stomachs and a line of ancestors queuing and pushing behind me as if trying to enter the spring field. Why? When history itself has rejected us and rendered us invis- ible, with language as its weapon? The answer is, simply: because we were there. We saw it all. But to break my silence, or what you take as silence, I must enter your language and domesticate you, just like a cow whisperer tames a wild bull by talking to him using words he knows. So I borrow your words and carve myself into them, make a hole in the shape of a cow. You might not see me, but you’ll notice my absence. This is where my story begins.

The history of cattle is divided into three eras. The Time Before History emerges gradually from the cooling climates of the Pliocene Epoch more than two million years ago. There in the grasslands of India, our ancestors, the great aurochs, came to life. Tall and heavy, they grazed in groups of twenty or thirty, changing location when in need of water or fresh edible grass. Their life was peaceful as they did not practice war, and the power relations in the community were tested in display fights, which both females and males participated in. The young ones were born in the spring, staying at their mothers’ side until strong enough to join the community on its endless travel. Beasts of the era, saber-toothed cats, hyenas, and Hominini, hunted them down when they could, but the aurochs could not be conquered— there were too many. Roaming in the millions, they gradually expanded their presence eastward and westward as far as the great grasslands extended. Over a million years later they inhabited most of the world, from Asia and North Africa all the way to the western coasts of Europe.

With the emergence of the common ape and its culture, we entered Historical Time. At the beginning of the Holocene more than 10,000 years ago, the great aurochs started to live side by side with the ape, gradually forgetting its traditional customs, and learning a new way of life. Why this anomaly in history, this exchange, took place, we don’t know. The last free aurochs who could have passed down this knowledge died alone in the remote forests of Jaktórow in 1627, taking the secret with her. We have only guesses and interpretations, unreliable traces of evidence. What we do know is that we—all 1.3 billion of us living today—are the descendants of approximately eighty individuals living with the Mesopotamian common ape 8,000 years ago. From that moment on our species’ destinies have been intertwined. The great aurochs became cattle, and the ape, humans.

If the time of the aurochs had been cyclical, determined by subtle changes in the weather and by the signs and traces of its companions, this new era was moving forward like a bull. From our manure, milk, and flesh human history rose like a wave, generating wealth and prosperity beyond imagina- tion. Cultures emerged; wars were fought. New lands were conquered and more and more of our kind were needed to support the lives of humans. Technology and writing and rituals of the afterlife were invented. Richness emerged, and so did theft. Corn, potatoes, antelope skins, pearls, rubber, children, woman, men of all sizes were exchanged as commodities. Animals crossed oceans along with parasites and diseases. Populations collapsed as new ones emerged. Kings were crowned and then beheaded. The generation and distribution of wealth knew no balance but determined destinies, fortunes, and misery randomly.

Meanwhile, unaware of our role as the source of this wealth, we lived a modest life. We lived in the world knowing it was only for us on loan. Everything passed, and we accepted it. The great tides of history arrived to us as streams so small they were hardly noticed. Wars killed us, but so too did peace. Food was the same, century after century. Barns were smaller or wider, our companions fewer or more numerous, but the daily routine remained. Birth, grazing, feeding, sleeping. Our centuries were defined by the hot breath of a companion in the silence of the shelter, the return to the fields in the day, and by the absence or weight of the plough, sledge, or carriage. We were poor in words for things: our vocabulary was verb-based, built from our doings and those of our companion beings. Our name was given to us by humans. That name rendered us objects. We were so deep inside history that we did not see ourselves within it, nor did we notice when it abandoned us altogether.

Ahistorical Time, the third era we unwittingly entered, is neither linear nor cyclical. We no longer went outside, nor did we sleep with our companions. Now we live inside the factory. It has become impossible to pass on any heritage. Calves are taken from us immediately after being born, and family lines are scattered out of our sight. We do so little that all our culture and habits have faded to nothing. We no longer learn from our mothers, but from the machine that tells our bodies how to stand and how to eat. Stuck in the industrial process we live in collective isolation, cut off from all relations that could anchor us to time, history, or culture. For how could we have culture, if culture was the transformation of things into objects? How could we have history, if history was the weaving together of times from the present moment into the past? We did not even have time, just the monotonous ticking of the clock, the parcelling of hours, minutes, and repetitions.

So here I am, claiming what is mine and my ancestors’ by law: the history that we so generously gave to you. By incorporating your tongue, we—the foundation, the mute—are pulled into existence, into human thought. But as we approach the threshold of history, we realize that outside language we are still nothing. I can only point to my absence, hoping that in this failure, a hole would emerge though which a cow could enter. But as I leave you now I do not evaporate into the realm of ideas and imagination. Instead I melt, I dissolve into your body, as my bovine colleagues have dissolved into the bodies of your family and friends. I remain close, hidden between your concepts, curled into your muscles, waiting to be noticed. And, some day, I will enter.