When I look back on growing up on our family farm in the 70s, I do so with a mix of nostalgia and horror. Most of the horror stems from the fact that the phrase “animal welfare” had a very different meaning from its current one. While no farmer with a conscience would allow their animals to starve, go thirsty or even suffer for no good reason, they had few qualms about doing things that might cause the animal deep distress for a short time if it was deemed necessary.
Among those brutal “necessities” was dehorning.
Most dairy breeds will grow horns if left unchecked. That can make them exceptionally dangerous, not just to those who tend them, but to each other. A responsible farmer removes those horns before they become weapons.
How we did it back then was barbaric. The cows would be allowed to grow their horns a few inches, by which time they’d be about two years old. At that point, they’d be led into a race at the end of which was a crush - a device for holding the animal’s head immobile. I was charged with employing a rope and pulley, which would draw its head down until it was effectively helpless, at which point my dad would saw the horns off with a hacksaw.
It was no different than those brutal amputations you read about surgeons doing in the field of battle before anaesthetics were invented. And it was just as horrific. The animals would struggle futilely and bellow pitifully and the blood flow, while not a geyser, was substantial. You can only imagine the shock and intensity of the initial pain for the animal, as well as the misery it must have endured for some time afterwards.
We never thought twice about it. The suffering was temporary and better than having the cows take each others’ eyes out.
Since then, others have thought twice about it, and today, thank goodness, strict rules apply to dehorning, at least in New Zealand. The animal must be young, effective pain relief must be applied during the procedure, and the person doing it must be adequately trained. Most dehorning is actually debudding - the removal of the newly emerging horns while the animal is still around calf age and the process way less traumatic.
How effectively those regulations are enforced, I have no idea; and it’s one reason that I understand why some people won’t touch dairy products.
This bloody preamble is by way of introducing today’s word, poll, which we’re seeing more and more of in the lead up to New Zealand’s three-yearly election to decide which centrist government will run the country. As you’ll know, a poll in this sense is a survey of public opinion - and that’s the sense that I suspect you automatically think of when you hear the word, which at first blush surely has nothing to do with dehorning cattle.
Except it does. The modern meaning of poll only arrived on the scene a few minutes ago in etymological terms. Its original meaning, from the 12th century, was a piece of fur from the head of an animal (or hair from a human). It came into English from German or Dutch pol, “head, top”. (If you’ve ever cut a tree back to its trunk so it can grow a new head of branches, now you know why it’s called pollarding).
By the 14th century, poll could refer to an entire individual in the same way you use head count to assess the number of people in a room. Such phrases, called synecdoche, are hard wired into language, as in those hot wheels you bought the other day, the hands who rush onto the ship’s deck in an emergency, and the neckbeards who haunt the dark corners of internet spouting misogyny as they scoff pizza in their parents’ basements.
By the 17th century, poll could also mean the counting of votes, and it wasn’t until 1902 that it was recorded in the sense of a survey of public opinion (as opposed to an actual vote).
But you can hear powerful echoes of poll’s first meaning in all its later incarnations. That also explains why those dairy breeds that don’t grow horns are called poll cattle.
Some animal welfare groups believe dairy farmers should be required to breed only such animals, stating that dehorning is always cruel. But selectively breeding for this trait is both difficult and requires a trade off against productivity. The uneasy tension between people’s expectations of cheap food on the one hand, and for the decent treatment of animals on the other, is nowhere more clearly highlighted than here.
Modern media are addicted to polls in the same way modern consumers are addicted to cheap, fast food. In the absence of solid policy announcements or in-depth research on the implications of different spending priorities, what easier way to get a quick hit of attention than by running a popularity contest that’s almost certain to show anything but how the actual election will turn out?
Perhaps the most famous such event took place in November 1948, when the Republican-leaning Chicago Daily Tribune printed a front page headline on the evening following the US presidential election (as votes were still being counted) that cried: “Dewey Defeats Truman”. By the morning, it was clear that in fact the opposite was true, a fact that Truman was only too happy to gloat about two days later.
Truman gloats. Who can blame him?
The paper’s confidence in its prediction was based largely on analysis and polls run by its Washington correspondent Arthur Henning, who’d predicted the winner in four out of five previous presidential elections. (Why you’d run a potentially reputation-busting headline like that with a 20% previous failure rate puzzles me, but there you go.) When Henning died in 1966, the Tribune’s obituary made no mention of this awkward moment in history, demonstrating that sometimes that it’s not just the winners who write history.
Bits and specious
From the WTF File comes news that one section of the Dublin deaf community has vocabularies for women and men that are so different that the two genders can sometimes struggle to understand each other. Signs differ for common words like cat, Monday, night and red. The cause, apparently, is sex-segregated education in Dublin, which has effectively created two distinct populations of “speakers”.
The Oxford English Dictionary has updated its website to play nicely with smartphones. More at Dave Wilton’s Wordorigins newsletter.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis states that the language you speak shapes or even determines your thinking. That means someone who speaks French will see the world differently from someone who speaks Urdu. While largely discredited in its strongest form, the hypothesis is now thought to have at least a smidgen of truth to it. Here’s an interesting 30-minute podcast by Australian linguist James McElvenny covering its history.
Quote of the week
You don’t need people’s opinion on a fact. You might as well have a poll asking: “Which number is bigger, 15 or 5?” or “Do owls exist?” or “Are there hats?”
John Oliver