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Cloven, by C M Taylor

Published December 2005

ISBN 1 905315 04 X • £7.99


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It was cow country, and beyond the garden stretched the fields, each stocked with a herd of creamy bovines, mooing and lowing and ruminating away between twice-daily milkings. Udders swayed from the cows' bellies, pendulous and unwieldy as over-stuffed shopping bags. And who can say, perhaps it was this early exposure to cows which was to prompt the years of cattle madness that the unusual Buxton brothers were to experience?

Paul Buxton had always hated the countryside, believing that cash machines and night clubs were innately superior to nature, and that a cow was just a failed horse with tits. So it was disturbing, to say the least, when his sinisterly vague boss made Paul a weird and lucrative offer to research human reactions to BSE.

To the merciless amusement of his veggie brother Chris, Paul begins to research the millennia-long human relationship with cattle. And aided by his beautiful anthropologist sidekick Jane, Paul reluctantly enters a world of rodeos, cave art, holy cows, hunting, domestication and, finally, foot and mouth… Why are cows in fields and people in offices? Why isn't it the other way round? How come humans fed cows sheep brains? Why did we kill millions of cattle during the foot and mouth outbreak? Why do we buy Friesian-patterned knick-knacks? If you've wondered about any of these questions, Cloven is the book for you.

It's gripping. It's unusual. It's moojestic.

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