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The cows showed up this week. It’s hard to miss them. They smell. They leave the green fields looking like a cloud of locusts dropped in, shit on everything then evaporated. They wear bells on leather straps of different sizes and shapes. This makes more noise than you might expect in an otherwise silent holler. It’s bit like trying to sleep during a set by a steel band high on cheap weed.
Unlike other members of my family, I am not a cattle person. I don’t know anything about them. In fact, I have avoided learning anything at all. This is by design because I think cattle are just above sheep on the intelligence scale and only slightly more interesting, personality-wise. I do know that this cattle breed is native to Piemonte and their breed-specific musculature makes extremely delicious crudo/tartar. I enjoy this whenever I can. Their milk is used in several DOC cheeses, none of which have set my hair on fire but I do not turn them down when offered.
The cattle in my area stay lower in the winter and move higher in the summer. While local herds seem to move among the foothill fields that surround my place, other herds make transhumance, the ancient tradition of moving to high pastures for the summer, then reversing the process in the fall. It’s a common early summer sight in Alpine Italy, Switzerland and France (though in Maritime-Alps France it’s mostly sheep, yuck). Local villages make festivals around it. I would like to see this but have yet to.
I am working to understand the rationale behind the bells. Obviously if a cow escapes the flimsy electrified enclosure wire and disappears in the chestnut forest, a bell would prevent her from hiding from you. But some cows wear sonorous bells on thick leather straps, almost as big as their big dumb heads, while others have cheap clanky bells from vendors at the mercatino. I’ve seen massive bells at flea markets, often on carefully decorated leather collars, and around the necks of prized cows at local ag fairs. Younger cows sometimes don’t wear bells at all. Why?

Really high quality cows, high status ladies, seem to have the big bells and decorated collars. This helps me identify the Good Cows, but I see how this could be misleading. What if bell allocation is randomized and this cow is actually pretty ordinary?
Bulls, I’ve observed, do not seem to wear bells at all. This adds a predictable gendered component to this analysis.

When something startles them, 40 or so cattle running/jogging/walking quickly emit a metallic roar that echos up the holler and cancels out the ambient noise created by insects and birds. It is loud, but not unpleasant.
Fortunately for you, longtime and newbie Carpetblog reader, I made a sound file of my cows for you to enjoy. Download the WLC app and you can put it on a loop so you can imagine what a rural holler in northern Italy in June sounds like.
“Predictable gendered component…”😂
Much more pleasant than the sound of leaf blowers and lawn mowers!