The Secret Life of Cows ★☆☆☆☆

Cows can be wise.

While I do not doubt that cows do have feelings, relationships, thoughts and inner lives the book contains a huge amount of projection, assumption and anthropomorphism. Looking past that it is largely a collection of inoffensive and cute stories about a multigenerational heard of cattle, highlighting their individual temperaments and approaches that still has tucked away a pervasive level of pseudoscience that I cannot abide.

There is some early references to trusting cows to seek out medicinal herbs to treat themselves, but it holds off until further into the book to start extolling the virtues of homeopathic treatments. Apparently that homeopathic practitioners give animals different treatment for the same illness based on temperament shows that they are treating the animals as individuals while conventional veterinary medicine using the same treatment for the same illness is inherently suspect. Towards the end the author makes a good point about how overuse of drugs keeps animals going in awful, factory farm conditions that are otherwise awful for their health (and which also breads antibiotic resistant bacterial strains) but then bafflingly seems to lay the blame for this on the medicine and not the factory farms! This is of course rounded out with some offhand vaccine skepticism for good measure.