In the summer of 2014, a German tourist is walking through the Tyrolean Pinnistal.

She is on a public path and has her dog on a leash.

In addition, cows graze and, when they have offspring, react irritably to any kind of disturbance.

A farmer has therefore put up signs on the side of the road warning of his animals: “Attention grazing cattle!

Be sure to keep your distance!

Suckler cows protect their calves.

Entering and carrying dogs only at your own risk! ”The cows are Tyrolean gray cattle.

Cute but aggressive.

One specimen sees a threat in the German tourist, more precisely: in her dog.

The cow runs towards the woman and tramples her to death.

Kai Spanke

Editor in the features section.

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Today the path and the pasture are separated from each other by an electric fence.

Why wasn't it like that back then?

After all, attacks were more frequent.

A week and a half before the fatal accident, bumping cows surrounded a family.

Then again an Italian woman was taken by the horns of a cow - her backpack saved her life.

The judge will later state that the farmer knew how sensitive his cows are;

In addition, he, the farmer, regularly observed the hikers and cyclists on the mountain pasture.

He is therefore liable for the funeral costs, the bereavement allowance and a pension that the husband and child are entitled to.

A structural problem

Florian Klenk, lawyer and editor-in-chief of the Viennese weekly newspaper Der Falter, who reports on the case in his book “Bauer und Bobo”, is certain: “The farmer is to blame.” Five years after the Germans' death, he criticized an Austrian talk show the farmer lobbyists - and get a shit storm for it. Because Christian Bachler, a thirty-six-year-old farmer from Styria, ventures his anger in a video on Facebook. This journalist is clueless, a posh Bobo, a bourgeois bohemian who has no clue about the concerns of the peasants. Klenk should do an internship at the Alm, then he would see how things are going there.

He in turn does not react offended, but accepts the offer.

The men start talking.

About climate change and Chinese tourists, EU funding agencies and the economic crisis, harassment from the authorities and milk prices.

In the past twenty years, a third of the farmers have moved from his area, says Bachler, because of the withered meadows, the expensive fodder, and the European agricultural policy.

A structural problem, not a single fate.

After just a few hours, Klenk realizes that it is not the “compensation to the cow sacrifices” that concerns Bachler, but the downfall of his class.

Kitschy country life folklore

With the participatory observation, connections become more concrete for the intern that hardly anyone knows. Global warming, for example, penetrates the body of cattle in the form of the liver fluke. The parasite lives in the dwarf mud snail, which thanks to the warmth migrates higher and higher up the mountain pastures and lives in puddles. If the cattle quench their thirst there, they become infected. So you pour closamectin on their backs. They absorb the drug through the skin and excrete parts of it with the cow dung. Any dung beetle that tastes it dies instantly, and so the dung remains undecomposed for up to two years.

Klenk is often in the role of the amazed schoolboy whose father grew up on a farm himself.

He writes factual passages, followed by mild polemics, conjures up kitschy country life folklore, only to flag it out as a finished enthusiasm.

Writing down a recipe does not seem to increase the likelihood of embarrassment for him, although he strays into the realm of the magazine-like retro lifestyle.

In short, he mixes styles of argumentation and registers as it suits him.

Here confession, there treatise and then even an interview with my own father.

The big system question

That doesn't have to be bad, as long as you keep in mind while reading that the journalist in this book is not practicing sober journalism. He has a concern and is happy to tell you again what has already been spread umpteen times elsewhere, for example that catastrophic conditions prevail in factory farming. Its main allies are numbers. At the catering wholesaler Transgourmet, a kilo of fillet of beef from Germany costs 16.66 euros. Pork is even cheaper, 6.66 euros. A farmer like Bachler, for whom the welfare of his animals is important, cannot keep up with this. He feeds 26 cows and sixty pigs and lives on eight hundred euros a month.

Nevertheless, Bachler's life is not a special case. Rather, his problems tempt the author to ask the system question and to sum up the duel in three words: “Bank versus farmer”. And the bank always wins. When Bachler, because of the constraints of the agricultural industry and EU requirements, sits on a mountain of debt that can hardly be paid off and threatens to lose his property, the editor-in-chief Florian Klenk becomes an activist. He organizes an online fundraising campaign in a twisted way, at the end of which there is a happy ending like a film. Farm saved, farmer saved. 12,829 people take part, totaling 416,811.25 euros. That, in turn, is a special case and probably the reason why this long story became an entertaining book.

Florian Klenk: Bauer and Bobo.

How anger turned into friendship.

Zsolnay Verlag, Vienna 2021. 160 pp., Ill., Hardcover, € 20.