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High-flying bulls

Published on September 18th, 1981 Photograph by Pat Langan

Sat Jul 21 2012 - 01:00

Published on September 18th, 1981 Photograph by Pat Langan

THE TIMES WE LIVED IN: NEVER , THEY SAY, work with children or animals. They’ll upstage you every time. The gentleman in the picture is a prize-winning Charolais bull by the wonderful name of Farmleigh Rebel. And the two-legged carbon-based life-forms on either side are, on the right, his keeper and stockman Louis O’Rafferty and, on the left, Benjamin Guinness, the third Earl of Iveagh, otherwise known as Viscount Elveden.

The picture is a study in facial expressions. Farmleigh Rebel has good reason to look smug. He has just beaten all the other bulls at the Irish Charolais Cattle Society show and sale at Goffs, Co Kildare, into a cocked hat by taking both the Bunker Hunt trophy and the Champion Bull of Show awards.

Mr O’Rafferty has the look of a man who knows all too well that Farmleigh Rebel might suddenly lurch to his right and give his aristocratic owner a hefty puck in the ribs. He is, therefore, poised to take any remedial action which might be necessary.

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Viscount Elveden, meanwhile, looks – well – hunted. Maybe he’s standing in something unmentionable. Maybe he knows, deep down, that he’s no match for this magnificent blue-blooded curly-headed creature whose forebears can – according to the Irish Charolais Cattle Society’s excellent website – be traced back to east central France in the 14th century. Or maybe he’s just not feeling terribly well; he was to die, of cancer, at the age of 55, just over a decade after this picture was taken.

Farmleigh Rebel, for his part, made a suitably upper-crust 2,000 guineas and doubtless went on to sire many further editions of curly white critturs. First imported to Ireland in 1964, Charolais cattle were initially housed in an offshore quarantine station on Spike Island. The first public auction, at Maynooth Mart in 1969, saw a bull sell for 1,100 guineas.

The bulls haven’t gotten any bigger in the interim, but the prices have. In May this year another champion, Carrowkeel Graham, bred by Thomas Gormley from Elphin, Co Roscommon, was sold for €6,100. Pigs may not be able to fly; Charolais bulls, apparently, can soar quite nicely.

Arminta Wallace

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