Why a cow?

“Don’t you think it’s funny that nothing’s what it seems
When you’re not looking forward?”

Size of a Cow by The Wonder Stuff

‘But aren’t cows terrible for the planet?’ is a thing we’re expecting to have said to us, and it’s already been said, but there it is nonetheless, a cow smack in the middle of our logo, where you can see it and everything, and looking friendly as if it simply being there wasn’t provocative enough.

So people ask ‘You do get this, don’t you?’ as if they believe that actually we don’t (and we’ve sat people in a room and shown them Cowspiracy ), and we need to receive a good old bit of patient explaining, like you might do to a cat.

I’ve tried explaining things to cats, mainly about leaving the sparrows alone. Not a process I’d call successful.

Rose doesn’t do reading.

So here it is, the little history of why Minch CAN has a cow in its logo.

It’s my fault, though I don’t think it’s any sort of a fault at all.

It’s March 2020 and we’re getting ready for our first public meeting, the one where we’d launch the group and ask people to join us, and I was looking at our posters and our leaflets and thinking we need something visual that says ‘this is us’.

‘We need a cow’ I thought, and the more I thought about it, the more I was convinced it really should be a cow, so I doodled a happy green one looking right out at me, and then months later when we came out of lockdown and started properly setting the group up, Jess picked up on it and made it look good.

Thanks Jess!

And it has to be a cow for this: Minch CAN is the CAN for the communities around the Commons around Minchinhampton town, and if anyone knows anything about us it’s that there are cows here.

We want to show clearly, heart on sleeve, that we’re speaking and acting for all of our communities and everyone in them, and the cows are the thing that unites us all, that’s part of all our lives, the thing more than anything that clearly says ‘around here’ and not ‘over there’.

Because we’re local people, doing local things, in a local way. We’re part of a world-wide effort, we love that, but this is us getting our house in order, and when we think of where we live, all of us think of the cows.

So a cow in our logo says to the people who live here, and to the people who live around us, that we are the CAN for the communities of the Commons, and the cows make the place where we live what it is. Our Commons don’t exist without the cows, and our communities don’t exist without the Commons, but that’s a story for another time…