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The Spike: or, Victoria University College Review, June 1921

A Student in Farms. — The Story of a Vicious Circle

page 37

A Student in Farms.

The Story of a Vicious Circle.

The spectacle of a plain, fourfooted cow sitting alone with her destiny, chewing the cud, and altogether unconscious of the laws of the Equinox, has in it J know not what of tragic, that moves me more than the crash of conflicting mastodons.

—Sir Owen Seaman, after Maeterlinck.

"I should imagine," said Markson-Peters, "that nowhere is there greater scope for the truly student point of view than on a farm such as this." Mr. Markson-Peters looked benevolently round him at the tract of dairy land where he was to spend his five months' vacation. You had only to look at him once to classify him as an evolutionary empiricist and a humanitarian—setting foot on a farm for the first time in his life. I knew he was a rather likeable young man in spite of that; so I did no violence to his illusions.

"Fancy keeping calves tied up all clay in a filthy shed! Why, the first principle of education is to adapt the individual to its environment. How does that man expect such treatment to develop character in an animal? These calves need the society of their peers, if they are to grow into fully-developed bovine amplitude. Sociologically, educationally and psychologically, your farmer is in a hopeless rut. Like that rough fellow trudging round and round the paddock behind his plough, they are entrapped in a vicious circle."

Mr. John Wicks, dairyman, drew his flea-bitten horses to a grateful halt beside us. Hay-wire played an integral part in the suspension of his clothing, also in the solidarity of the harness. He was a utilitarian by habit and a pessimist by conviction. A man of few words—polite ones, at least—he made no objection to my friend's proposal for the emancipation of the young. "Best put them with those bulls yonder! Grab them by the stick and earhole! Kick them in the guts if they make any fuss."

Markson-Peters became all spectacles and owlish inquiry. Wicks made an objurgative resumption of his journey, and left me to the philosopher's catechism. The "stick," I explained, had nothing to do with corporal punishment. It was just the tail. "A hole" always denoted the absence of any tangible object, but "earhole," paradoxically enough, referred to the auditory appendage.

To such a profound psychologist and educationalist, I thought it unnecessary to explain that for nine weeks the instinct for freedom and the desire to exclude the intermediary bucket in its milk supply had been curbed in that young breast and denied outlet; and that instincts were reinforced by compression.

With great aplomb, Mr. Markson-Peters laid hold of the lusty bull fore and aft, as directed, while I untied the rope which had fettered the bovine exuberance of youth. There was a pair of gasps, an upheaval of smoke and smell, as the young bull trod on Mr. Peter's pipe, and the pair left for the open spaces, touching earth every twenty feet or so. A chorus of bellows from the rear stopped the procession in mid-paddock. No bull ever ignores a challenge couched in those terms. The herd sire looked conveniently small at that distance. His youngest son wheeled about, page 38 dived between Mr. Peter's astonished and agitated legs, and set forth to do battle.

Mr. Peters had retained his grasp on the sources of motion by little short of a miracle. The calf took little notice of him, even now as he sat facing astern, and clave to the salient features as a Scot unto a saxpence. He fell off shortly, and turned a neat furrow with his shoulder blade; but a sporting desire to be in at the finish impelled him to hold fast; and the calf, scared to a gallop by the fresh turn of events, drew up breathless at the boundary fence.

A strange alteration had come over Markson-Peters. His garments bore traces of travel. His eye held the glint of the professor who starts his lecture anew as the door closes for the fifth time since ten past. Cold ferocity was depicted on his face. He bethought him of Mr. "Wicks's last injunction, and made play with his feet. I pried loose his steely grip on the unlucky calf, and removed the prospect of immediate murder. Mr. Peters was still misquoting Scripture and thinking aloud when I closed the gate of the calf paddock upon a badly-winded and hopelessly under-educated calf.

It was some weeks before it was possible to converse impersonally on the subject. "Reversion to type," said Markson-Peters. "I nearly fell into the vicious circle myself. Now I am managing the animals quite well with moral suasion. Animal psychology is a fascinating study."

No doubt a similar consideration induced Mr. Wicks to bear with him for five months. "After he came a stoumer with that bull of Strawberry's, he got all sorts of unholy notions inveigled in his bosom," he confided to me in his academic style—an acquisition attributable to Mr. Markson-Peter's penchant for the correct term on all occasions. "He denounced about kindness and instinctive reactions and affective aphorisms of the carbolic, bucolic and diabolic—" Here Mr. Wicks began to transcend the realms of concise and reputable utterance. The burden of his song can be put in syllogistic form, thus:—

All theoretical fanatics were agriculturally unsound.

Mr. Peters was able to adapt his philosophic phraseology to the exigencies of a cow-kick on the shin.

There was hope for Mr. Peters yet (and even science had its uses on a farm).

"The vicious circle is getting him," said I.

Markson-Peters tells me he is going to write a thesis this vacation on "The Emotional Complexes of the Mammalian Quadrupeds" (hayburner, 4-cylinder, Glaxofontis Taranakiensis).

"I am going to observe the sensations accompanying the administration of food, punishment, water, alcohol, and so on; the emotional reactions to warmth, pain, blue, grief, cold, red, etc. There are two infallible indexes of every shade of emotion—the oscillation of the tail, and the orientation of the ears. Thus, when a cow swings her tail freely about her lateral axis, or points her ears north-east and south-west respectively—"

So he had evolved and reverted, from a scientist to a farmer and back again—to a devotee of the "stick-and-earhole" persuasion. Such is the lot of man. To-day he steps into the breeches of youthful aspiration; tomorrow he stops a chink to keep the wind away.

R. A. S.