Gordon Ramsey Vs The Buffalo

I heard about Gordon Ramsay's buffalo-herding car crash I lost all respect for him. What kind of man uses a 4x4 to herd animals? Back in my day we never had the luxury

I grew up in a small farm in Devon so our traditional method of rounding up cows was the bleary eyed 3am dash in pyjamas. Cows are escape artists second only to goats; they wait till everyone is fast asleep before crashing through hedges and trumpeting for joy as they dash for freedom or at least someone else’s garden.

There are three stages to a cow hunt, stage one is finding the cows. This is normally fairly easy as they leave a trail like a crashed spaceship through hedges and they fart when they are excited so you can hear them from miles away.

Stage two is to get behind the cows, so you can try and scare them towards the farm. This is probably the bit that Gordon had problems with. Heady with freedom the cows are strutting around like troubadours and so take any attempts to get around them as inspiration for more jumping and hooting.

The third stage is the actual herding; this is the point where you wish you were in a 4x4. Cows are bigger than humans, much bigger, so they really aren’t that scared of slightly unfit 8 year old boys in stripy pyjamas who would much rather be in bed. If you walk towards them they jump about a bit for effect and then charge.

If a cow charges at you the best thing to do is to not be there, the second best is to stand your ground. Cows, unlike Bulls tend to break off the charge at the last minute and pretend they didn’t mean to charge you anyway. If you run away the cows take this as encouragement and chase after you, mooing frantically to get other nearby bovines to join in.

Either way your father will tell you off for not grabbing the cows horns and wrestling it to the ground like a hero from a Greek legend. Farmer’s sons are the lowest of the low on the farm, somewhere under naughty sheepdogs and hens that don’t produce eggs. After all a cow can be worth a lot at market.

We tried rounding up cows on horseback using the overweight carthorses that were in the next field but they had got all excited by hearing how much fun the cows were having so they were impossible to catch. Motorbikes were used next but they ran out of petrol long before the cows had even finished doing their warm up excises.

Eventually we managed to get the cows back in through boredom more than anything else, they haughtily stepped back into the shed as if a early morning run was just part of their routine and the hedge was patched up using part of an old gate and my bicycle.

When ever someone tells me that eating a steak is bad I think back to the shivering 8 year old in his pyjamas chasing after cows, the meat always tastes better after that.