Jem Butters

A cow escaped her farm in Poland in November and is living her new life. She has been found months later roaming a forest with a herd of European bison. Forest officials say the herd has fully accepted the cow as one of their own. ✨

Woman of the Day Anna Sewell born OTD in 1820 in Great Yarmouth, author of Black Beauty, her only novel and still one of the top ten books for children today. She wrote for an adult audience hoping to convince them of the importance of the humane treatment of animals. Anna’s parents were Quakers. When she was two, her father’s shop failed and they moved to London but money was tight. Anna and her brother Philip were initially home-schooled by their mother and frequently sent to stay with their grandparents on the Dudwick Farm estate in Buxton, Norfolk. It was here that Anna first learnt to ride - she was a keen rider - and it is almost certainly the inspiration for Birtwick Park in Black Beauty. When Anna was fourteen, she fell while walking home from school in the rain and badly injured both ankles. Medical mistreatment followed and she was left severely disabled for the rest of her life. As a result, she would often get around using a pony and trap and, always a keen observer of the natural world, increasingly relied on horses to help her get around. Her mother said, “She learned all their secrets.” Anna gained an incredibly accurate understanding of how life must look and feel to horses, simply through observation, experience, awareness and empathy. In 1871, she began her ‘little novel’, crafting it over six years, sometimes dictating it from her sick bed to her mother when she was too poorly to write herself. Her mother recorded it on little slips of paper. The book is written entirely from the point of view of Beauty, a former carriage horse who "breaks his knees" (damages his carpal joints) after a bad fall - rather like Anna herself - and is sold off to a series of owners, some cruel, some kind. Subtitled The Autobiography of a Horse, it broke new literary ground as one of the first novels to describe the world through the eyes of an animal. Black Beauty was a compelling advocate for animal welfare. Beauty tells us that “those who have never had a bit in their mouths, cannot think how bad it feels.” His friend Ginger describes the physical effects of the bearing rein, used on carriage horses to keep their heads unnaturally upright because it was fashionable: "It is dreadful... your neck aching until you don't know how to bear it...it hurts my tongue and my jaw and the blood from my tongue covered the froth that kept flying from my lips.” Anna’s novel was pirated in the USA and sold as Uncle Tom’s Cabin for Horses, where it was seen as a striking metaphor for slavery and freedom. “Never whip a horse for shying: he shies because he is frightened and you only frighten him more and make the habit worse.” Anna sold her book to Norwich publisher Jarrolds in 1877 for a one-off payment of £40 (£3,860 in today’s sterling). To date, over 50 million copies have sold worldwide. The book achieved its objective. Soon after its publication in 1877, the Anti-Bearing Rein Association was formed to try to stop the practice of using such reins, and the cause was also taken up by the Canadian Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Bearing reins began to fall out of fashion. Anna, bedridden and in severe pain, died just five months after its publication. She was 57. “If we could act a little more according to common sense, and a good deal less according to fashion, we should find many things work easier.”

Right, that's the clock on the cooker adjusted, now for the microwave. 🤣🤣