Moo-ving tale of memory

Isn’t memory a marvellous thing? And not just human memory, but animal memory.

Everywhere I look or listen there’s a story on an animal that has suddenly remembered something.

Most of these stories are about animals released into the wild who meet their former human caretaker several years later.

Tearful greetings are exchanged as the now fully- grown lioness embraces her long lost friend.

Or the giant ape stares knowingly into the eyes of her old human ‘relative’ and reaches out her hand in friendship.

Or the dolphin once caught in fishing nets is released and comes back to say ‘thankyou’ to her land-bound saviours.

They are touching moments.

Then there are the stories, mainly from the war years, of faithful dogs waiting patiently at the train station or at the wharf hoping for the return of their master.

More tears shed here.

Now my normal attitude would be to be somewhat cynical of these stories, dismissing them as an animal liberationist’s fantasy, but I have my own story to tell.

As a young boy in high school in the 1960s, I was a member of what was then called Junior Farmers. Along with several other students, I had a project to look after an abandoned calf on a dairy farm.

Each one of our calves had a name. Just for the record my calf’s name was Harmony.

I called her this as I fed her early in the morning and then also later in the day.

Because she was a project cow, I had to weigh her regularly, report on her diet, her health and so on. But eventually when she was old enough, she became part of the greater herd.

We parted as great friends and she went into the herd at about the same time I left that school to attend another.

But I kept in touch with a couple of my school friends and several years later I had reason to re-visit the school and the dairy, where one of my friends now worked.

We were watching the cows filing in to be milked.

I asked my friend if he knew what had happened to the young cows we had looked after until they were ready to join the herd.

He nodded his head and told me one of them had died, but the other three, including Harmony, were in this herd.

I yelled out her name and a cow stopped, turned, looked and took a step towards us.

“Yep, that’s her,” my friend said. He knew all the cows.

But I didn’t recognise her at all, she’d changed a lot in four years, my memory was not so good.