As you may have seen in my previous articles that in our family we love pets. We used to have parrots, pigeons, hen, duck, cows, goats, dog and many more. In my village Panchali and in fact all villages you will see big farmers will have hundreds of cattle in their houses and they sell the milk in the market. In many cases they build a thatched house with fencing where they keep the cattle. They assign one or two people to take these cattle to the grazing fields which are around the farming fields or little further. Early morning they take out of the fence and you will see when they come out, one after one and on the road you will see the roads are blocked. At that time our roads are mud roads and in rainy season its very difficult to walk on the roads. When they take the cattle for grazing they take early morning breakfast and take food for lunch. They also take with them a towel which they use for wiping sweat and also to tie on the head to manage the Sun. These cows, oxen are different colors. You will also notice they tie some bells to some of the cattle, these identified cattle go away from the grazing fields and these farmers who take care of these cattle find it difficult to locate them when they take back the cattle to their living places. So they tie bells in their necks and in some cases a wooden plan light weight so that the cattle cannot run fast. So these are some of the mechanisms they follow. The also take the cattle to nearby water source such as streams, rivers.
We used to have two cows one is white with large horns and the other one is red with short horns. Since we cannot find the grass for them, we also send these cows with other herds who take the cattle to grazing fields. We pay them some monthly fee. Many times either one or both cows dont reach alongwith the herd and they lose the route so we had to go around the see if we can find them. Since evening time, its difficult to go to fields with bushes to search. Some times they come back late in the night if not early in the morning we had to go around in search.
Since we also need to feed them at house including the calves, we had to buy hay, which is used as fodder and also some fodder cakes. Also i used to go when i find time to nearby fields closer to my house take a sickle and a gunny bag with a rope. And i used to cut the unused grass and bring home. Since you need to get a good grass, i used to go in side the bushes which is dangerous as you will find variety of insects, snakes and so on and few time i came across snakes also. Since i take them to the farm fields, you will find varieties of crops including peanuts – sometimes i used to pluck the trees secretly so that the landlord do not see me and pluck and eat the peanuts. You will also find varieties of fruits including custard apples, some berries, gua, mango etc. In front of our house there is unused space where we built a small hut for the cows. With the cow dung we used to make cakes. These are cakes are pasted against the walls and after few days when they are dried they take them out and use them for fire for cooking. In fact in the villages you will find heaps of these cakes in every house. In rainy season either they cover with plastic sheets or take them to safe place.
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