THE MUNDARI · SOUTH SUDAN

A nomadic tribe whose entire world, wealth, status, identity, survival, rests on their sacred cattle.

The Mundari are a Nilotic nomadic people living remotely along the White Nile, where cattle are the ultimate measure of wealth, status, and power. They treat their herds like pampered children, massaging and washing the animals, leading them to the best grass and cleanest water, the women tending their sleeping ground while the men lie down to sleep among them at night. Known as the Cattle Kings, they live by a code of honour and what they call the dignity of nature, surviving on maize, groundnuts, milk, and yoghurt.

“We don’t own the land,” they say. “The land owns us.” Their connection to this place runs deep into prehistory: the brand marks on their cattle match rock carvings in the surrounding hills and caves, carbon-dated to some six thousand years ago. Generosity is sacred and greed is punished, by satirical songs sung at the offender’s expense, and children are raised to share. Proud, free, and unencumbered by money, government, bureaucracy, or the internet, the Mundari open the series with a startling vision of contentment.

TONY · BODMIN MOOR, CORNWALL, UK

A man who has never owned a car, a phone, or a television shares his remote cottage, and his life, with the bull he rescued from the snow.

Tony lives without electricity, gas, heating, or a car. He has never used a computer, never been online, never boarded a plane, never left England. His home is a remote, desolate 16th-century cottage on Bodmin Moor, and his sole companion is Scrunch, a one-tonne Highland bull who lives indoors alongside him.

Years ago, paid to go out into a spring blizzard to rescue newborn lambs, Tony found a discarded cow’s birth sack frozen solid on the moor, a lifeless calf inside. He carried it home intending to bury it in the morning, cleaned it up, and laid it by his stove to thaw. At dawn he woke to find a calf standing unsteadily in his kitchen, its head beside the warm stove, constantly scrunching up its face, and a name was born.

Tony raised Scrunch like a son, and the calf grew into an enormous bull. If Tony leaves for more than a day, Scrunch bellows so loudly he can be heard for miles. The two have their own way of communicating and an unbreakable bond. Tony believes he saved the bull, but in truth the bull saved him, giving him a reason to live. His honest, pragmatic take on life is utterly refreshing, and his credo could be the whole series in three words: “Less is more.”

SABINE · ALSACE, FRANCE

A champion dressage rider finds an unlikely soulmate in a bull she taught to jump.

Sabine began riding at five, finding an escape from a wealthy mother who never loved her and a sense of worth among animals. She rose to become a champion show jumper and dressage rider, until her beloved horse, Underwood, died of a heart attack mid-competition, and she walked away from the sport entirely.

She and her husband moved to a tiny village in Alsace, where she grew attached to a dairy cow known only as No. 304. One morning the cow was gone, penned with young bulls bound for the slaughterhouse because she had stopped producing milk, though the farmer never knew she was pregnant. Sabine bought her on the spot. Two days later, No. 304 gave birth to a bull calf who wobbled toward her on unsteady legs, big brown eyes fixed on hers; she named him Aston, after her husband’s favourite car.

Raised among horses, Aston believes he is one. Watching Sabine’s highly strung thoroughbred bite and kick her during training, he would lower his horns to protect her. One day she joked, “If you’re so interested, why don’t you have a go,” and led him over a low jump, which he cleared with ease before turning for her approval. With a saddle made from old carpet and a pocketful of apples, she taught a bull the size of a van to perform dressage. The only thing keeping him out of competition is that he is a bull. Sabine has never spent a night away from him, and believes he can read her mind.

SUDEVI · MATHURA, INDIA

A German diplomat’s daughter gave up everything to spend her life healing India’s sacred and abandoned cattle.

Orphaned at twenty and searching for purpose, Friederike boarded a bus out of Berlin and travelled to India, where her father had once served as Germany’s diplomat. She arrived in the summer of 1978 and settled in the holy town of RadhaKund in Uttar Pradesh, falling instantly in love with the culture and feeling a profound connection to Hinduism, whose scriptures she would study for more than twenty years. Her awakening was complete when her guru gave her a new name: Sudevi.

Using her inheritance, she bought land and founded the RadhaSurabhiGoshala, a sanctuary where sick and wounded cows are fed and nursed back to health, and no cow is ever turned away. Forty-four years on, Sudevi and the goshala’s ninety workers care for some two thousand animals. At sixty-four she still works sixteen-hour days, as she did at twenty.

In 2019 she was awarded the Padma Shri, one of India’s highest civilian honours, and has come to be called the Mother Teresa of Gau Mata. Her credo is uncompromising: there is a sacred bond between people and cows, and as long as humanity continues to kill and eat them, it condemns itself to endless suffering.

V. J. PARSANA · AHMEDABAD, INDIA

A self-made millionaire walked away from his fortune to rebuild the simple life he had known as a boy among cows.

Sitting on his private jet, businessman Vijay Parsana had everything, money, cars, the trappings of success, and had never felt more miserable. As the plane climbed, he asked himself when he had last been truly happy, and the answer carried him back to childhood: a village close to nature, tending a herd of Gir cows. What had once felt like nothing, he now understood, had been bliss. He decided, there and then, to give it all up.

Handing the company to his family, he bought land on the outskirts of Ahmedabad, built a modest home, and began growing his own food. He brought home a Gir cow named Poonam and a prize bull named Arjun, and when they produced a calf, he felt truly at peace for the first time in years.

He says living with cows has made him healthier and his life more balanced, calm and joyful, the way it was in childhood, before the overthinking and tension; and, in keeping with Ayurvedic tradition, he credits the cow’s milk and even its urine with benefits to his health. He now urges everyone to keep a cow and witness for themselves the change it brings.

FIONA · HERTFORDSHIRE, UK

Born to privilege but forging her own path, a woman built a dairy where no calf is ever taken from its mother, then fought the system to save her herd.

Fiona grew up around cattle from the age of four, her Scottish father was one of England's leading cattle vets. Fiona was forbidden from farming and sent to France to study a culinary art she despised, banished, she felt, by a father ashamed of the birthmark down one side of her face. She married rather than return home, had three children, and left a violent husband. As a single mother and family outcast, she worked several jobs, raised her children alone, and never once asked her family for help. Only when the children were grown did she finally do what she'd always wanted, though not conventional dairy farming.

Her micro-dairy, Calf At Foot, refuses to treat cows as disposable. Her "girls" keep their calves until natural weaning, and she sells only the raw milk the calves don't need, to people who don't want it taken from a distressed animal. But landlord after landlord exploited her, hiking rents, withholding grazing, charging extortionate water rates for simply being a woman who farmed her own way. Then government inspectors ordered her healthy herd destroyed for what they claimed to be a TB infection. Fiona knew at heart her cows were not infected with T.B..Rather than lose her girls, Fiona and her thirty-two cows went on the run, living in an exposed cattle trailer through heatwaves and blizzards in order to save them. A female vet finally confirmed what she'd always known: every cow passed the official TB test. Word of mouth led her to a landowner who believed in her and offered a permanent home for the herd on a regenerative estate. Fiona and her unique herd were transported to a different world, an unspoilt, harmonious way of being. Their new home and pastureland is idyllic, a landscape that provides food for the soul, a combination of unspoilt nature and ancient trees.

VINCENT · LIBERTY, TEXAS

A teenager pulled out of an LA gang found redemption, and himself, in the cattle of rural Texas.

Vincent grew up with his single mother in South-Central Los Angeles and, as a teenager, fell in with a gang tied to the Crips. At fourteen he was stopped driving a stolen car with a firearm inside. His mother and her Baptist minister begged the court not to send him to a juvenile correctional facility, and the judge agreed to let him relocate instead to his grandfather’s smallholding in Texas.

There, the only Black family for miles, they grew everything they needed. Isolated and out of place, Vincent came home from school one day to find his grandfather, Joe, had bought him a cow. It began his love affair with animals, and for the first time he felt happy and safe. Encouraged to take up rodeo to fit in, he became the best rider for five hundred miles in any direction, earning the community’s respect, breeding Brahman cattle, and supporting his mother and grandparents with his winnings.

Years later he heard of a rare Watusi bull bound for slaughter after injuring its owner. Vincent understood the animal instantly: Oscar, as he named him, was an African, like Vincent, an outsider in America, always part wild. He found Oscar a mate in Miami, and the pair produced a calf, Oliver, who bonded with Vincent the moment he was weaned. “I love Oliver, and he can feel it,” Vincent says. “He knows he’s one of the family.”

HEIDI · SCOTLAND

On the anniversary of her father’s death, a woman at her lowest saved a dying calf, and it brought her back to life.

Heidi grew up in a family of animal lovers with loving parents and two sisters, though her father lived with bipolar disorder and severe depression. After she left home for the city, she became depressed too, and was prescribed medication with harsh side effects. When her father took his own life, Heidi left university and drifted from job to job, sad, lonely, and burnt out, until she found work as a housekeeper on a traditional Scottish estate, where the Laird proved a kind, grounded, and compassionate presence.

On the anniversary of her father’s death, she found herself in the cow barn beside a newborn calf that couldn’t stand. The vet wanted to put him down; the farmer gave him a single day before he would be sent for slaughter. Heidi bought him on the spot and swore she would get him on his feet. Every evening after work she bottle-fed the bullock she named Thor, begging him to stand, but his legs kept giving way.

Close to giving up, she finally resigned herself to leaving him to his fate. Pausing at the barn door, she glanced back, and Thor was on his feet. Within days he was leaping around the pen like a spring lamb. Laird gave Heidi a field, and Thor is now a one-and-a-half-tonne bull. Each day she lies on his back, brushes him, and walks with him. She says that since Thor, her depression has lifted and she no longer needs her medication, convinced that the love between them is something she can physically feel, and that it has set her free.