Birdman

People wonder why I'm so obsessed with donkeys. I've looked into it, and my only finding is that the rest of you are underdoing it. The donkey was built for the ground where everything else gives up. It lives on thorn and scrub that a horse would starve beside, climbs rock on hooves like chisels, cools itself through those ears, and can lose nearly a third of its body weight in water, carry on eating, then drink 25 litres in three minutes and walk off as if nothing happened. We tamed it 7,000 years ago in the dry country of East Africa, and it has been the animal of the hard places ever since. So it was the donkey, long before the horse, that carried civilisation on its back. One of Egypt's first pharaohs was buried at Abydos with ten donkeys laid in graves beside him, every spine worn from a lifetime under loads. The grain, the salt, the copper and the news of the ancient world moved at a donkey's pace, and wherever a hill is still too steep for a wheel, they still do. The same animal fed our babies. Donkey milk is the closest milk on earth to a human mother's, Hippocrates prescribed it, and the foundling hospital in Paris kept a stable of jennies so the orphans could be put straight to the udder. A fair share of Europe's abandoned children owe their first month to a donkey, and most of those donkeys carry a dark cross down the back and across the shoulders, which the old story says was given to them on Good Friday. It carried our wounded too. On the beach at Gallipoli a stretcher-bearer from South Shields found a stray donkey, and for 24 days the two of them walked up and down Shrapnel Gully under fire bringing broken men down to the boats, until a machine gun got the man. The donkey went back up with the next one. Of everything the Anzacs brought home from that campaign, the thing they chose to remember was a donkey. Then there is the stubbornness, the one fact everybody is sure of, and it is the opposite of the truth. A horse meets danger by bolting, which is why horses die on cliff paths. A donkey stops, looks at the thing in front of it, and makes a decision, and it will refuse to step into water it cannot see the bottom of because it is right not to. For 7,000 years we have been calling a risk assessment an attitude. Put one in a field of ewes and it appoints itself. A fox or a loose dog comes through the hedge and the donkey goes at it, head down, front feet first, and keeps going until the thing has gone. Nobody trains that in. It decided they were its sheep. It remembers a face and a field after 25 years. It will stand over a dying companion for a day. It lives to 40 and outlasts half the people who ever owned it. There are about 50 million of them alive, carrying water, firewood and children for the poorest people on earth, and close to 6 million a year are now killed for their hides, boiled down into a gelatine sold as a tonic. The animal that did the most work for the least thanks is being melted into a wellness product. Seven thousand years of hauling us uphill, feeding our orphans and carrying our wounded, and the best we managed in return was to turn its name into an insult. So no. Not nearly obsessed enough.

Nine people in ten would point at the steak on the right and call it the healthy one, and I have run out of patience with every single one of them. The one on the right is a ribeye with the ribeye taken out. The one on the left is the animal as it was built, a cap of fat round the edge thick enough to earn the word, a seam of it between the muscles, marbling through the eye so dense it looks like frost. Fifty years ago the butcher would have charged you more for the one on the left and apologised for the one on the right. Now the trimmed one is premium and the real one is a guilty pleasure, and the country that fell for that is the country with the diabetes clinic. The fat is the food. A, D, E and K2 live in it and nowhere else on the plate. The flavour lives in it, which is why the right one needs a jus and the left one needs a knife. The fullness lives in it, which is why the right one has you at the fridge by nine and the left one has you forgetting breakfast. The fuel lives in it. The red is the packaging, and you have been taught to buy the packaging and tip the contents away. And this fat, out of every fat on the counter, is the one that cannot hurt you. The cow's rumen saturated it before it reached her. It sits solid and white on the board, it does not go rancid in the pan the way the bottle of sunflower oil does, and it is the fat your great-grandmother fried everything in while heart disease was still a rarity you wrote up in a journal. So who convinced you otherwise. A margarine firm with a heart on the lid, a 1977 guideline written by a man who never ran a trial, and forty years of magazine covers, every one of them paid by somebody with a bottle to sell. They could not sell you the fat on the left, because it comes free with the cow. So they taught you to fear it and sold you the substitute. Half a century on, the lean one costs more, tastes of less, leaves you hungry, and gets called healthy by people who have never once asked what the fat was for. The one on the left. Eat the edge first. Stop apologising for being right.

Some of the biggest trees in the rainforests of Alaska are partly made of salmon, and the bears are the ones who put it there. Every autumn the salmon come in from the Pacific, run upriver, spawn and die. Their bodies are loaded with nitrogen and phosphorus built up over years of feeding at sea. The bears meet them in the shallows. A bear in a good run does not even eat the whole fish. It takes the brain, the skin and the eggs, the fattiest parts, and drops the rest. And it rarely eats at the water's edge. It carries the catch into the trees to eat in peace, up to half of everything it kills, and leaves the remains and its droppings across the forest floor. Researchers from the University of Washington measured the nitrogen in the trees beside spawning rivers. Ocean nitrogen carries a chemical signature that land nitrogen does not. The trees and shrubs along salmon streams were getting 22 to 24% of the nitrogen in their leaves from salmon. Sitka spruce on those banks grew more than three times faster than spruce beside rivers with no salmon in them. A tree that would normally take 300 years to reach 50cm thick got there in 86. Nitrogen is the thing plants are always short of. Farmers buy it by the tonne, made in a factory out of natural gas. The forest gets it free, delivered by one animal, inside the body of another, and spread through the trees by a third. That is how fertility has always worked on this planet. Animals eat, die and drop it, and the plants grow out of what they leave behind. We now have a policy of taking the animals off the land to save the planet, and a fertiliser plant to make up the difference.

Hector stood through the saluting guns for seventeen years, and on Thursday night in a field in Denbighshire he nearly went through a fence over a village firework display, and the reason he did not is a donkey and a goat. The farmer knew something the forums do not. A Cavalry Black is not calm about bangs. He is trained about bangs, which is a different thing. Every gun that ever went off at Hector's shoulder had a man on his back and a line of horses either side of him and a rule, and the rule was that the world was not ending and he was to stand, and he stood, because he had decided to believe the man. Four years ago the man got off and did not get back on. The shoes came off. The coat went woolly. The horse let down, which is what everybody wanted for him, and what nobody says is that letting down means the rule goes too. So the first rocket went up over the hill at ten past seven, with no man, no line and no rule, and Hector came off the shelter wall like a horse half his age with his tail over his back and his eye white and twenty two years of discipline nowhere in him at all. He went for the fence. A horse in fright runs at the gap, and the gap in that field is the bottom corner where the wire meets the hedge, and the farmer was already over the gate with the headcollar knowing he was forty yards too far away to matter. Nelson got there first. Nobody saw him move. Nobody ever does. One moment the donkey was in his dry corner and the next he was standing in the bottom corner of the field, square, chest to the horse, exactly where half a tonne of Cavalry Black was going to arrive, the way he once stood where a colicking horse wanted to drop so that the horse had to stay up. He did not bray. He did not flinch. He stood in the one place the horse had to go through, and the horse, who has never in four years gone through Nelson, stopped. Hector stood in front of him, blowing, shaking down the whole length of himself, with the sky going green behind the hill. The second rocket went up. The horse's head went up with it and his weight went back onto his heels, and the donkey put his nose against the horse's chest and left it there. That is the whole of what a donkey does. He does not spend adrenaline. He has a lifetime's supply because he has never dipped into it for anything that did not concern the hay, and when the animal he has decided is his herd is coming apart, he simply stands next to it and declines to come apart as well, and the horse reads the donkey, because a horse takes his reading of the world off whatever is standing beside him, and what was standing beside him had read the sky and found it beneath comment. And above both of them, on the ridge of the field shelter, a goat. Keith had not moved. An Anglo-Nubian from a mountain where the sky does what it likes, standing on a roof with his feet planted and his ears forward, watching a firework display the way he watches a latch, with interest and no fear whatsoever, because nothing in the valley was a gate and nothing in the valley was his problem. He stood on that roof through the whole forty minutes like a sentry who had not been told the war was on. So the horse stood between them. A donkey at his chest who would not move and a goat above him who would not move, the two most ungovernable animals in Britain, and a war horse who had lost his rule found the only two things in the field that still had one, and borrowed it. He shook for twenty minutes. Then he shook less. When the big one went up at the end and the valley lit white, his head came up and his weight went back, and the donkey's nose stayed on his chest, and he stayed. The farmer stood at the fence with the headcollar and did not go in. There was nothing wrong with the horse that a headcollar addressed. He said afterwards that he had watched that horse stand for the guns on the television years before he owned him, with a trooper in a breastplate telling him the world was fine, and that on Thursday he watched him do it with nobody on his back for the first time in his life, and that it was harder, and that it was better. They were in the shelter by nine. Nelson in his corner, standing, ears out, on. Hector lying flat in the doorway with his legs into the yard, asleep inside ten minutes, the way a horse sleeps when he has been frightened and the thing he trusts is on its feet. The goat came down off the roof at some point in the dark and the farmer does not know when, and this morning there was a goat shape in the straw on the horse's other side, and a goat back on the roof pretending there was not. Seventeen years he stood because he was told to. On Thursday he stood because of who was standing with him. The farmer has put the headcollar back on the hook and says he is not sure he will take it down again.

The biggest farmer in Britain is a charity with 5 million members, and it is spending their subscriptions on taking the farming off its own land. Every activist reaches for the same line. British agriculture has been swallowed by corporations, faceless Big Ag, the family farm long gone. The Trust's own accounts answer that. The National Trust owns about 620,000 acres, more than Dyson, more than the Crown, more than any company in the country, and around 1,300 tenant families pay it rent to farm them. It is the largest landlord of working farms in Britain. Big Ag here is a charity that sells scones. Last year it announced a nature plan with a target area covering nearly all the land it owns, which means nearly all the land those families work. The Tenant Farmers Association called it removing land from the farmed estate unnecessarily for rewilding, and that is as close to a swearword as the TFA gets in print. The land it is planning for was not bought. It was given, by people with conditions. Beatrix Potter left the Trust the biggest gift of farmland it ever received on the written instruction that the farms stayed working farms and the Herdwicks stayed on their fells, hefted to their own ground, the flock passing with the tenancy. Those sheep are still up there because a tenancy agreement keeps them there. Thin the stock on a Lakeland fell in the name of nature and you are overturning the will of the woman who gave you the fell. So if you pay the £8 a month for the car park, the tearoom and the sense that something is being looked after, understand what the direct debit is funding this decade. A plan to replace the thing you walk past with the view of it. The corporation you were warned about has a membership card and a gift shop.

Inspector: "I'll be straight with you, there's been a complaint." Farmer: "There usually is. What have I done?" Inspector: "Your cattle were seen standing in a field in the rain." Farmer: "Yes. They do that. They're outside." Inspector: "The complainant felt they looked wet." Farmer: "They're waterproof. It's the one thing the manufacturer got right." Inspector: "I've walked the lot. Water's clean, feet are sound, calves are on their mothers, condition's good. I've nothing to write." Farmer: "Write that, then." Inspector: "There's no box for it. The form assumes I've found something." Farmer: "Put me down as pending." Inspector: "There's a second complaint. Someone filmed you from the lane shouting at a cow." Farmer: "That was Mabel. She was stood on my foot." Inspector: "And the footage of the shed?" Farmer: "I've one shed and it's behind you. That film was shot in Yorkshire. The group puts its logo over a farm gate and the public fills in the rest." Inspector: "You've seen the Arla business this week." Farmer: "I've seen what comes after it. The farm gets suspended, the lorry stops coming, and by Friday the milk's arriving from somewhere that would fail every question you've just asked me and never get asked." Inspector: "I'll put it down as no action." Farmer: "You'll be back." Inspector: "I'll be back. Somebody will see them standing in the sun."

Customer: "Why did mutton disappear? My gran talked about it like it was Sunday itself." Butcher: "Because you stopped wearing wool." Customer: "What's wool got to do with it?" Butcher: "Everything. For a thousand years this country kept sheep for the fleece. The wool paid the rent. A ewe was clipped every summer for six or seven years, and when she'd given her last fleece she gave you Sunday dinner. Every leg of mutton was a sheep that had already paid for herself." Customer: "And lamb?" Butcher: "A luxury. You'd no more eat a lamb than burn a five-pound note. That's seven fleeces walking into the oven." Customer: "So what changed?" Butcher: "The jumper went plastic. From about 1960 a fleece was worth less every year until it was worth nothing, and today a farmer gets roughly what it costs him to shear her. Nobody keeps a sheep seven years to collect two pound a time, so they bred her for the one thing left that paid." Customer: "Meat." Butcher: "Fast meat. Lambs that fatten by four months and leave before they've cost anything. Inside one generation the sheep went from a wool animal with a dinner at the end to a dinner in a hurry that grows a coat nobody wants." Customer: "And the old ewes?" Butcher: "Still coming off the hill every autumn, and still the best eating in this shop. Five years of grass and heather in the fat, meat the colour of beef, and she's never seen a bag of feed in her life. Grass-fed is the label people pay double for on a steak. On her it's just Tuesday." Customer: "Why's she half the price, then?" Butcher: "Because nobody asks. A leg feeds eight, low oven, four hours, and the gravy off it will make you forget lamb was ever invented. The old boys who come in for it never bother with anything else." Customer: "My gran used to say the fat was the point." Butcher: "Your gran was right about most things. The jumper went to plastic and the roast went with it, and nobody noticed they were the same sheep. You can undo the whole thing in one shop. I've got the leg. The jumper's your problem."

The same campaign that killed China's sparrows built a hundred dams across one province of Henan in ten years, the hydrologist who said the dams were too many and too weak was removed from the project, and in August 1975 sixty-two of them failed in a single night and drowned more people than any dam failure before or since. Banqiao was the showpiece, finished in 1952 to harness the Huai River, and when the Great Leap began in 1958 the slogan over it was water accumulation first. Reservoirs went up everywhere, built by peasants with baskets and shovels on the same timetable as the furnaces and the sparrow drives, to the same reporting standard. Chen Xing, the engineer who knew the basin best, said the province was building so many that it was raising the water table into the fields and the salt into the soil, and that Banqiao needed twelve sluice gates to pass a flood. It was given five. He was a rightist. He was sent away. The dam was called the Iron Dam. Typhoon Nina came up from Taiwan in the first week of August 1975 and stalled against a cold front over the Huai basin, and a year's rain fell in a day. Banqiao's five gates could not pass it. The water came over the top an hour after midnight, the dam dissolved, and a wall of water six miles wide and seven metres high went down the valley at the speed of a car, taking the next dam with it, and the next, until more than sixty had gone. Whole towns were under water before anyone had lit a lamp. The official figure for the flood is twenty-six thousand dead; the figure that includes the famine and the typhoid in the weeks after, when a province sat in standing water with the dead floating in it, runs to a hundred and seventy thousand, and some put it over two hundred. The Party kept it secret for thirty years. Chen Xing was brought back after the famine to say what he had said before, and brought back again after the flood. A sparrow weighs an ounce and a dam weighs a mountain, and the same men measured both by the number they could report, with the same result.

In 1979 Britain's most beautiful butterfly went extinct because the country had killed its rabbits and taken its sheep off the hills, and the scientist who worked out why had to put a flock back to bring the insect home. The large blue is a thing of chalk and limestone downs, and it has the strangest life of any animal in these islands. The caterpillar feeds on wild thyme for a few weeks, then drops to the ground and does an impression of an ant grub so convincing that a red ant carries it underground, where it spends ten months eating the ant's own young. Only one species of ant will do it, and that ant only lives in turf cropped so short the sun can warm the soil to the depth of its nest. Short turf means grazing. For a thousand years the grazing was sheep, and from the eighteenth century it was rabbits as well, millions of them, mowing the downs to a lawn. In 1953 myxomatosis arrived and killed ninety-nine rabbits in a hundred. Hill sheep were already coming off the downs as the farms went to the plough or to subsidy. Within a few years the turf grew long and cool, the ant died out of it, the caterpillar was carried underground by the wrong ant and eaten, and the butterfly dwindled through the sixties and seventies while everyone blamed collectors. The last British colony, in Devon, died in 1979. Jeremy Thomas spent the decade on his knees in the grass before he understood it. The whole chain ran back to a mouth cropping a hillside. In 1983 the butterfly was reintroduced from Sweden onto a Somerset slope where the first thing the project did was put the cattle and sheep back on, hard, and the ants returned, and the large blue came after them. It is now on thirty sites, every one of them grazed on purpose. A butterfly the colour of the summer sky disappeared from England for want of a sheep, and the people who saved it did not plant a flower or build a fence. They hired a grazier.