A Cow's Life: The Surprising History of Cattle and How the Black Angus Came to Be Home on the Range

Natural History, Feb, 2005 by Laurence A. Marschall

A Cow's Life: The Surprising History of Cattle and How the Black Angus Came to Be Home on the Range by M.R. Montgomery Walker & Company, 2004; $25.00

Only a vanishingly small fraction of the U.S. population lives within earshot of a moo anymore, so it's easy to forget that modern civilization and modern breeds of cattle evolved symbiotically. Cattle were domesticated perhaps as early as 10,000 years ago, and have long been a principal source of meat, milk, and power for hauling loads and tilling land. The "bovine ilk" (in Ogden Nash's inimitable phrase) was the first large creature to be genetically engineered, in the sense that it was selectively and intensively bred. In the millennia since early Mesopotamians first converted the fierce, ancestral aurochs into the contented cow, a wide variety of specialized breeds have been developed. And of all those breeds, according to M.R. Montgomery, the epitome of bovinity is the Aberdeen Angus, or Black Angus, cow.

So who is he to say? Montgomery is a writer living in Lincoln, Massachusetts, a bosky and exclusive suburb of Boston, whose only working bovine residents, to my knowledge, are confined to an Audubon Society farm (though numerous cuts of deceased specimens probably grace the SubZero freezers of the town). But he has worked on a ranch in Montana, and he's a skillful and charming wordsmith; moreover, he's done his research so well that even readers without a whit of interest in cattle husbandry--vegetarians included--will find much to ruminate on in his book.

The Aberdeen Angus, as the name suggests, is a product of Scotland. At least since the Roman occupation of Britain, highland farmers have grazed cattle on their lands in the summer to sell to English markets in the south. The long, cold northern winters and a lack of plentiful forage, however, forced the Scots to sell their cattle "lean" to buyers who would fatten them up later in the more temperate English climate.

Then in the early 1800s, the Highlanders discovered a readily grown and easily stored variety of yellow turnip that their cattle simply loved. Fattened cattle yielded bigger profits than lean ones, so the Scottish cattle economy and cattle-grazing industry took off. Ambitious Scottish landowners began to develop stock animals that were hardy, easy to breed and raise, and, pound-for-pound, provided the tenderest, best-tasting meat. The result was the Aberdeen Angus.

Montgomery acknowledges three of the great Scottish stockbreeders--George Macpherson-Grant, William McCombie, and Hugh Watson--as the founding fathers of the so-called Black Angus line. Those men, however, not only established a purebred line; they also managed to preserve the line by paying close attention to ancestry, establishing a formal system of cattle registry that, to this day, enables ranchers anywhere in the world to trace individual Angus cows back to members of the original herds.

Thankfully, Montgomery's book does not dwell for long on the history of the landed gentry. But he does serve up plenty of anecdotes about ranching life in the western United States, as well as welcome digressions on the economics of modern-day beef raising and the basics of bovine psychology. And there's more in this book than any non-cowboy would ever want to know about artificial insemination. In the end, though, it's impossible not to share the author's enthusiasm. "Cows are also wonderful just to look upon," he concludes. Thanks to Montgomery, they're also wonderful to read about.

LAURENCE A. MARSCHALL, author of The Supernova Story, is W.K.T. Sahm Professor of Physics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, and director of Project CLEA, which produces widely used simulation software for education in astronomy.