The Revival of a Mothers Love

The Revival of a Mothers Love

          

Mongolian herders have five types of domestic animals: they have small cattle; such as: goats and sheep; and they have large cattle; such as: horses, cows, yaks, and bactrian camels. A herder’s life style is to raise and to understand the animals. January and February is the animal’s calving time. Sometimes the mother animals don’t want to feed their own newborns; herders try to solve this by using special traditional methods such as; playing soft music and using a soft voice to sing to the mother to try and soften her heart. These traditional methods usually end up with the mother recognizing and taking care of her baby. These methods are also used to have a different animal mother adopt the baby if the original mother died.

This amazing tradition mostly works with small domestic animals. A baby lamb can be adopted by a female sheep because the herder sings, “Toig, toig, toig”, by singing the herder tempts the mother sheep into comforting the lamb. Some parts of the country sing something different such as: “Durui, durui, durui”. The same applies to goats by singing, “Cheeg, cheeg, cheeg,  or  tseeg, tseeg, tseeg, or zuu, zuu, zuu”. Sometimes these methods do not work as the  goats and sheep won’t adopt the

babies. During these times herders try to have cows to adopt the babies. When cows

adopt their own kind (calves) the herder sings: “Ohoh, ohoh, ohoh, or Hoov,hoov,hoov, or hoor, hoor, hoor,or  sugai, sugai, sugai.

  But other large domestic animals can be more difficult to  convince to adopt or to even recognize their own child if they did not recognize their child after birth. Camels especially take a long time to do so; sometimes it even takes days.

They place the morin huur on the camels hump and as the wind blows through it the sounds made by the wind on the strings will calm the camel down. They attempt to unite the two by tempting the mother with showing that the calf misses the camel mother. The herder sings with emotion to try to get the mother to take in the baby. They usually sing with “Hoos, hoos, hoos… “  

calling to the colt singing “Gurii, gurii, gurii the colt looks so cute as it comes galloping to you.  Horses usually do not have issues with recognizing their foal; the only time an issue like this normally occurs is if the mare dies during foaling (birth) and the foal needs to be adopted by another mare.

They usually accompany the songs with music played on the morin huur.(It is a horse head fiddle a kind of cello with two strings made with the hairs of a horses tail and has a square shaped body with a long neck; at the top of the neck is the figure of a horse head).

            Mongolian herders not only just raise the animals but they also understand and care for the animals. They try to solve the issues in the animal’s life and make life as pleasant as possible for the animal.

 By. S.Uzmee