On the first floor, in the farmyard of the Sheltozero Veps Ethnographic Museum, a cowbell for cattle is on display. The choice of this particular hall for the exhibition is not accidental: the first floor of the farmyard was occupied by animals. The cowbell was donated to the museum by Maria Fyodorovna Guseva, a native of the village of Sheltozero, who lived on Lisitsyna Street.

The cowbell is a trapezoidal metal bell. The upper part of the cowbell has an eyelet in the form of a loop. The eyelet is wrapped with a strip of kirza (a type of artificial leather); the kirza is fixed (stitched) with a linen rope. Inside the bell, in its upper part, there is another metal eyelet with a clapper attached to it, which emits a booming sound when moving.

A Vepsian proverb says: Lehm om tanhal, ka I söm om stolal (“Cow in the yard, food on the table”). The cow was considered the main breadwinner in every Veps family. Cattle provided the family with milk, meat, and fertilizers. Bags and shoes were sewn from the skins of cows and bulls, and from horns hunting powder flasks and horns for baby feeding were made. Milking a cow was a sacred thing for the Veps. Many Vepsian prohibitions speak about this. For example, the mistress could only milk a cow in clean clothes, in a headscarf and shod. Among the northern Veps, the mistress could not greet the guest without washing her hands: it was believed that then the cow would give less milk. To this day, the Veps believe that milk can not be sold after sunset, otherwise the cow will lose milk.

During grazing, a shepherd was chosen, to whom the Veps had a special attitude: the horn, whip and belt of the shepherd could not be touched. There were a number of restrictions for the shepherd. Thus, a shepherd could eat berries only from a hat, and not from a bush, he could not shake hands, take eggs from bird nests, kill snakes, chop trees with an ax, sleep in the forest under a tree — shepherds slept on the lawn, putting a stone under their heads. The shepherd ate at the table from a separate cup with his own spoon, was the first to go to the bathhouse and always washed alone. It was strictly forbidden to seek meetings with females, otherwise the magical power granted to the shepherd by the owner of the forest would be lost.