My family owns a dairy farm back in Ireland, mostly cows obviously. We also have about 15 or so sheep, and 4 goats (I assume for yard maintenance, but I never asked)... When I went back to visit, my grandfather didn't seem to really do any extremely hard physical labor though. Part of that is the nature of the terrain, and the livestock did a lot of work for him.
Cows are always fun, there's a portion of our farm that's a little above a road, so whenever we walk home from the store they like to come over to the fence and look at us. Once one cow comes the rest will want to see what he's checking out and come by too. The allies actually used cows to determine if Germans were nearby when fighting in Normandy, they'd typically gather towards where they were to see what they were doing. They're actually probably my favorite of the animals (other than the dogs of course) because they're surprisingly emotional. As I said, they're naturally curious (so when I was a teenager and was learning to play guitar, I always has an audience), and they get excited about going out to the fields and such.. Seeing cows run and skip around is hilarious.
