clare griffiths

The year is 1746. You live in the Highlands, weeks after Culloden. The redcoats burn your house and drive the cattle of the glen down to Fort Augustus, 2,000 at a time, where dealers up from Yorkshire buy them by the lump. You walk to the camp to beg for one cow back for the children and are turned away at the gate. The old die of hunger on the bare hillside while the Duke of Cumberland holds horse races on the flat ground below. The year is 1847. You live in Ireland, a country that lived off its cattle until conquest handed the herds to the landlords and left you an acre of potatoes. The potatoes have rotted black in the ground. The ships leaving for England are loaded to the rails with cattle, pigs and butter, and your neighbours are found dead in the ditches with their mouths stained green from eating grass. A million die. The man running relief from the Treasury, Charles Trevelyan, writes that the famine will bring about a salutary revolution in the habits of a nation. He is knighted for his work. The year is 1905. You are Herero, in what is now Namibia, a people whose whole life is cattle. The German general has ordered every Herero shot, with or without cattle, and the rest driven into the desert to die of thirst. In the camp at Swakopmund the women are made to boil the heads of the dead and scrape them clean with shards of glass, for shipping to universities in Germany. Four Herero in five die. The survivors are forbidden by law to own a cow. The year is 1932. You are Kazakh. The Party has taken your herds and sent them to feed Moscow and Leningrad, and the bodies along the roads are stacked like firewood. You pull a sled across the steppe with your dead child on it, and if you run for China the border guards shoot you. Four Kazakhs in ten die, and the ones left become a minority in their own country. The year is 2026. You milk cows in County Cork, where the cattle sailed for England while your great-great-grandparents chewed grass in the ditch, and your own government has modelled culling nearly 200,000 dairy cows to meet a climate target. Take a people's animals and hunger does the rest. The redcoats knew it. The Treasury knew it. The general and the Party knew it. Ireland learned it in a ditch with grass in its mouth, and is now drawing up the list itself.