Sainte Foy Tarentaise : 19 June 2020
If I were a cow or a sheep, I would quite fancy a summer in Sainte Foy, in the high Alpine mountains. Enjoying the views, sleeping outside with all my mates, and scoffing tasty herbage all day long. There are cool mountain streams trickling through the pasture to keep me refreshed, and sweet smelling pine trees to shelter under in the midday sun. Lazy hazy days of summer, chewing the cud with my friends!
“Just take me there”, I can almost hear them mooing and bleating, and it seems that the farmers are listening, because that is exactly what they are doing. The ‘transhunance’ as it is known in these parts, is the local practice of moving cattle from the lowlands in winter to the highlands in summer, and vice versa.
Local farmers have brought their cattle up as high as 1500m in Sainte Foy for now. They are enjoying the rich pickings in the pastures at this level, and will follow the plant growth up the mountain throughout the summer.
Cows and sheep have different techniques when it comes to picking their favourite leaves for a tasty meal.
Sheep nibble the herbage, enabling them to leave it looking well mown, like a tennis lawn cut very close to the ground.
Cows on the other hand, have big, strong, and very long, rough tongues which they use to wrap around their chosen snack and tear it off. Look at the cow’s tongue in this picture.
Cow’s also have a great system for digesting grass and plant material. They have four stomachs, the rumen, reticulum, omasum and abomasum. As the cow tears off a plant for its lunch, she chews it just enough to swallow it.
This largely unchewed food travels to the first two stomachs, the rumen and the reticulum, hence she’s called a ‘ruminant’.
After a good eating session, she finds a nice spot to lie down, (although she can do it standing up), and regurgitates some of this plant material to chew properly. This is called ‘chewing the cud’. Look at the fabulously sleepy and blissful way the two cows in this video are chewing their cud. They look like they are chatting, and it is no surprise that we use the expression ‘to chew the cud’ as a way to say that we are going to chat about something!
Here’s looking forward to lazy hazy summer days chewing the cud with our friends in Sainte Foy!
Read other articles about Sainte Foy on the Time to Ski blog page
