How now not so brown cow

It's funny how conditioning works and how deep it goes. Even after all this time I'm still taken aback to come across cattle (Bos taurus) roaming and grazing the woodland. So ingrained are the images of cattle in neat fenced fields fed to us from our earliest days through the old Macdonald had a farm world view, that it's easy to forget the cattle were here before the farms or fences and they got on just fine. It wasn't until the Neolithic (relatively recently in human evolution) that cattle began being domesticated in this part of the world and they'd have been very different beast both in form and size.  These early cattle were domesticated Aurochs (Bos primigenius), the now extinct giant Ox. Although they've only recently been reintroduced to the forest woodlands, they were only absent for a relatively short time; up until the enclosing of the forest in the 18th century cattle roaming would have been a common sight, as attested to by tree management practices such as pollarding (like coppicing although done above 1.8m) which were banned after enclosure. Pollarding allowed the collection of withies (straight juvenile stems) for craft purposes and was done at afore mentioned height to protect them from cattle browsing, showing cattle were common place in the forest before timber production took over. I like seeing cattle or pigs in the forest it reminds me of what the forest would have once looked like. As I say, our conditioning must be strong when something looks out of place in its nature setting.