Why animals are a great friend to the idle parent
‘Why have you got all these animals?” asks my mother when she visits our farm. For some inexplicable reason, she is not a fan of chickens wandering in the kitchen, dogs jumping up at her or cats on the sofa. “You can’t cope with your children,” she says. “Why add extra burdens?”
We have 16 dependent animals in our household: 12 chickens, two cats, one dog and one pony. We used to have a white fluffy bunny, but she escaped and was last seen lounging at the gate with a wild rabbit. And next week the animal count will dramatically rise to 10,016, when our first nucleus of bees arrives.
Animals are a great friend to the idle parent, because they harmonise work and play. In the main, they are very useful: the cats keep the mice and rats away; the chickens produce eggs and more chickens; the pony produces valuable manure and could be used as a form of transport when the world collapses; and bees make honey. Last year we killed two pigs and are still eating their meat. The food is unquestionably of a higher quality than anything from a supermarket and the animals live a free and uncontained life.
Animals are also enjoyable. Yes, they need feeding, but is it work or play to feed the hens and collect their eggs? Or to throw scraps into the pig pen and watch them snuffling and grunting? Such tasks are great fun and can be carried out by very small children (at three, Henry is perfectly capable of feeding the hens). In this way, the children can make a genuine contribution to the running of the household, which is surely better than using leisure time to watch television?
To learn where food comes from will help prevent the children from becoming ignorant slaves of supermarkets. Plastic wrappings, pre-sliced food, over-designed labels and an excess of packaging all tend to separate us from nature and make us forget that food comes from real animals.
There’s an issue of self-reliance here, too. The chickens produce a surplus of eggs and so the kids can learn the fundamentals of local barter and trade. Last week, Arthur swapped six eggs for a jar of marmalade with Trevor, the school bus driver. I think some entrepreneurial ability is useful in an idle child because it may help to avoid the necessity of getting a boring job for money in later life.
Animals will also do child care for you. Delilah plays with the cats for hours and the dog is always a great playmate. The boys run around the yard with their friends trying to catch chickens. Riding is a great pleasure and girls particularly enjoy looking after horses.
Clearly, too, to learn kindness and respect towards animals is an important skill. “For a man to be trustworthy,” writes William Cobbett in Cottage Economy, “the boy must have been in the habit of being kind and considerate towards animals; and nothing is so likely to give him that excellent habit as his seeing from his very birth, animals taken great care of, and treated with great kindness by his parents, and now-and-then having a little thing to call his own.” The biggest animal I was allowed when small was a hamster. Toby was a source of great pleasure, although one couldn’t say he was useful. I suppose hamsters could lead to cash: a 12-year-old local girl has a tidy little business breeding and selling hamsters to the pet shop.
Now I can do what I want, I am seriously tempted by the idea of a cow. Before the Industrial Revolution, most households would have had a cow, in the same way as most households had a pig or two in the backyard. Until the 1970s, the house where I live kept a cow and the farmer’s wife made all her own butter, milk, cheese and cream. She would never dream of buying any of them. Cow keeping may involve some extra work, such as milking, churning, leading out to pasture and so forth, but surely toiling for their parents is precisely what kids are for?
Nothing quite like nestling in against a cow on a cold day and milking. Making edible cheese gives a great sense of achievement too! I’d recommend a cow any day, especially Jersey’s -definitely more play than work!
Animals come in handy even if your flat is too small to encompass a cat: on long train journeys, I try to find (friendly-looking) passengers with dogs. My otherwise extremely active son (18 mths)is happy to while away hours of mutual woofing and circling, parents forgotten, while we read the paper or look out of the window.