Half the herd is missing.We count noses, but they don’t add up. Our remaining cows linger by the neighbors’ fence; the neighbors’ cows stare through it, separated only by different brands and ear tags and four strands of barbed wire.
So we steer our horses through the gate onto the neighbors’ land. Two riders search the hills at the base of the Elkhorns, the Montana range above my family’s ranch. Another rider and I go low, and as we round a bend, our offending cows come into view. Some lounge, others twitch their tails as the neighbors’ three red bulls drool and huff. As we move our cattle into a bunch, calves find their mothers and knock noses into milkbags. The cows stretch out necks to yank up still more of someone else’s grass.
We push. The cattle become a stream of black hides that surges forward, bottlenecks, swirls with calves who can’t find their mothers, and tries to change direction. We work to push the neighbors’ bulls back; they’re like three red-headed jocks, ogling our cows and getting into fights that could topple our horses if we aren’t careful. Impatience blooms in my chest. I yell and ride hard against the edge of the herd. We need to get everyone to the meeting point with the other cowboys.
Then one cow swings her head back, and I glimpse her white mask and unimpressed gaze. Ah, Moody: If there’s any sort of mess, my favorite cow will be in the middle of it. I first noticed Moody when she was a pregnant heifer, chewing her cud atop the manure pile, ignoring her fellow cows. When she had her first calf, she found something to care about but still couldn’t resist sneaking into the hay or over a downed fence. Time would pass. Then she’d suddenly remember she was a mother and leap around the field, looking for her calf like a drunk searching for her purse at closing time.
Naturally, Moody’s in the center of the chaos, her calf trotting beside her. Bemusement replaces my impatience: Moody might be an opportunist, but she’s not trying to ruin my day. Neither are her colleagues. The herd is made up of individuals with their own desires. Some broke through the fence because they found those grunting bulls irresistible. Others viewed the land beyond the wire as an endless salad bar. Others did what cows do: followed the herd.
There’s a growing movement within ranching to understand how cows think. Temple Grandin and Bud Williams redesigned slaughterhouses and holding pens, realizing that cows experience the world differently from us. By observing what frightens or entices cows, we can improve their lives. This might seem achingly obvious, but it requires a shift in how we’ve been taught to work with cattle — and each other. Low-stress cattle-handling only works if everyone is on board. Try telling an old-timer that his father’s aggressive way of moving cows might be counterproductive. Egos get tangled in stirrups. They should really teach courses on low-stress cowboy-handling.
An empathetic approach shifts away from domination toward something with softer edges, but it grows slowly as good intentions meet entrenched human habits.
The German biologist Jakob von Uexküll coined the term umwelt for the subjective way each creature experiences its environment. The spider’s eight feet tune to the vibrations of its web. The trout darts away when danger fractures the light along the riverbank. The Smith Family’s cows follow the siren song of the neighbor’s pasture.
For so long, we’ve treated animals like dumbed-down humans. But that’s beginning to shift. In 1974, Thomas Nagel asked, “What’s it like to be a bat?” That question is unanswerable; even the most scientific, whole-hearted attempt would still be a person imagining being a bat.
Yet the question regularly circles overhead. Ed Yong’s An Immense World brought the popular science lens to the umwelt. In the New York Times podcast Animal, Sam Anderson asked what it’s like to be a puffin, a wolf, and, yes, a bat. Sabrina Imbler and Anelise Chen mix science and memoir, blurring the line between human and invertebrate umwelts.
An empathetic approach shifts away from domination toward something with softer edges, but it grows slowly as good intentions meet entrenched human habits.
To puzzle over how another animal experiences the world means setting aside our own umwelt and trying to step into the strange, deep pool of another’s.
Cows might seem like a simple exercise in interspecies imagining, yet they’re more complex than most assume. According to Lori Marino and Kristin Allen’s survey of scientific studies, cows form lasting bonds, navigate mazes, learn from their elders. They remember people who handled them roughly, even if they’re dressed like everyone else. They smell stress hormones in other cows’ urine and become stressed themselves — not empathy, perhaps, but something approaching it. In ranching, we discuss genetic projections for milk production and carcass weight like baseball stats, but we know less about the animal itself.
I spent decades away, so I’m coming at ranching with fresh eyes. New York friends occasionally ask, “What’s it like to be a rancher?” with such curiosity, I feel like I’m hanging upside-down from the rafters.
Ranching requires enough botanical knowledge to irrigate alfalfa and the mechanical skills to fix a plugged-up hay baler. There’s the social aspect — neighbors and fences and riding together across the plains, wordlessly cooperating to turn a runaway calf. The financial and the spiritual loom: All morning, I feel deeply fortunate to steward this land, only to have an afternoon panic attack over QuickBooks.
And, of course, there’s sorrow and sweetness in spending my days raising animals for meat.
When I met Moody, I asked another rancher if motherhood had changed how she saw calving. She said no, but it changed how she felt about weaning. When a cow’s first calf is shipped off, it’s often hard on the mother. Later, they become accustomed to having their babies here one day, gone the next. But first-year cows don’t know the pattern, so they search the fencelines, calling out for calves already in semis rattling down distant highways.
I couldn’t do this job if I lingered on how Moody must have searched for her first calf. What’s it like to be a rancher? You live amid the messy churn of the seasons and the brutal realities of animal agriculture — the tubed calf choking to death on milk, the broken-backed cow who needed multiple bullets to still, the knowledge that despite our affection, these animals were grown to be consumed. The human umwelt contains so much knowledge — and power. Considering another creature’s world can feel dangerous to the work at hand.
“To puzzle over how another animal experiences the world means setting aside our own umwelt, and trying to step into the strange, deep pool of another’s.”
Still, I believe in ranching. I don’t see it as a choice between ranching and a gentler world, but rather between ranching and asphalt. A good ranch preserves land for untold umwelts. I feel lucky to be surrounded by cattle and the multitude of life in these fields: the porcupine trundling through alfalfa, the sandhill cranes leaving prints across the muddy banks.
I don’t know what it’s like to be a cow, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t wonder. I can work to be a gentler rancher, and to bring more cowpokes along for the ride. Having Moody helps. Still, some days I’ll slip up and let my ego and impatience take over. I’m only human, after all.
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This article appeared in the October 2025 print edition of the magazine with the headline “To err is human, to forage bovine.”
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