Posted on 05/24/2023 2:29:21 PM PDT by BigFreakinToad
I gotta say-I like cows.
I know they can have a malicious side like any animal, but for large beasts, they seem generally like cud-chewing spectators on life.
All my interactions with them have been pretty good, but I just avoid those areas around any livestock where they can put the power of their leg on you in a fit of ill temper.
I read an account recently where the writer described a teacher in nuclear engineering describing to his students just how dangerous a nuclear reactor, no matter how well run, was.
He said it was like a stubborn mule that hated you. it would wait 30 years for the right time and the right mood, and cave your skull in with a hoof.
Anyway, I treat all livestock as I would a firearm. Always assume it is loaded and ready to go off.
But I sure enjoy looking at cows, chewing their cud, and looking at you in lazy disinterest, just chewing.
I really got tickled by an Internet video a few years back of a guy playing a trombone to call some cows towards him from a field by playing some music out into the field. And all the cows would appear, their heads popping over the terrain, coming into view, their ears erect in interest. As they all approached the source of the music, it wasn’t a stampede. Some were walking with a graceful, measured slowness, some trotting, and a few galloping for only a few quick yards, but they were all converging on him.
The cows began to form in a wide parabola around him, facing him, the fat latecomers jostling in between them to get a better look.
For a split second, you could almost imagine a crowd of people doing the same thing with the same body movements. It really made me laugh. That is how I remember seeing it...now, I will have to go back and find it to see if I remembered it correctly...
So, yeah...I like cows...:)
Heh, “Chasing Vicky” made me grin...:) It made me think of how much I like cows. (I am going to guess it is quite different when you own them, but...perhaps not-what was it like for you?)
I have three cow-related stories, but my favorite took place back in the early 1980’s in Western Massachusetts.
I was driving west to meet some friends to do some hiking and camping, so I had to get going early, and it was perhaps four or five AM on a Sunday morning early in September.
I was driving a yellow 1976 MG Midget, and although I was hardcore about driving it with the top down because I really liked it, it was too misty. Heavy wet fog.
The sun wasn’t up yet, but what early light there was got completely stifled by the sticky gray fog. You couldn’t see too far off.
I was in Western Massachusetts approaching Belchertown, where my oldest brother stayed to live after he graduated from UMass. It is a pretty rural area. On an early Sunday morning, there was nobody on the roads at that hour.
I approached a T in the road where I was going to go left, I think it was on Route 202, which was far busier than the road I was on.
The intersection where I had to stop was at the top of a small upward grade. I had traveled that road before, so even though I couldn’t see what was off the road on either side due to the dim light and thick fog, I remembered it was largely fields.
At the intersection, there was an old style street light with a wide, green shade that lit the entire intersection, and dangling suspended in the air over the road was a blinking red light.
In that fog, that old-style light cast a pale cone of sharply defined illumination that covered a few feet out of the roads that came in, as well as the entire area in the middle of that intersection.
It remembered thinking that is exactly what it would look like with a helicopter or alien spaceship up there looking down.
I slowed down, top up and driver side window open in the cold morning, and approached just below where the cone of light started on my road. As I sat there, trying to determine if it was safe to pull onto the road in that soupy visibility, I heard a sound.
This was just before dawn, in a rural part of the state, on Sunday. So, it was quiet. Even my MG Midget with its twin exhausts was muffled in the fog. But I heard something.
My brain for a split second recognized it as the sound of coconuts being banged together by mischievous boys who had been out of doors all night. Very faint.
Then, as my mind unscrambled it and the sound became louder, you could really tell it was an animal, a large one, not a deer in size, but instead, a moose in stature, with the larger weight and bigger hooves.
And it was getting louder. And closer.
It made me just a bit nervous. I loved driving that little MG Midget with that piss green-yellow color, but getting in a wreck or hitting an animal in that thing would have taken on a different dimension than, say, it would if you were driving a big beefy vehicle, up off the road just a bit!
So, whatever was out there galloping unseen towards me in the mist, it was bigger and faster than me.
As I peered out at the murky intersection in tense anticipation...I heard another sound. A different one.
At the second I heard that metallic sound it resolved visually into a ghostly cow cantering into the cone of light, a big metal bell on its neck flopping from side to side as it ran.
In its surprisingly graceful trot on a paved road, it turned onto the road I was on, and came towards me, the hoves making a clopping cow noise that sounded very powerful. (Even more so, because I couldn’t see what it was.
Total Unconcernedness with me and my little car.
It just looked fixedly in front of it, past me with an absolute studied disinterest, as if I were a telephone color or a tree. She had somewhere to go.
As my head whipped around, I saw the galloping rear end lit by the cone of light dissolve into the dim fog and disappear into the mist behind me.
The whole affair from the first faint sound of hooves to the receding hindquarters into the dark could have only taken about 10-15 seconds at most. But for some reason, some forty years later, it seems like a little clip of film inserted into my head that I can play over and over. Very dreamlike in its appearance now.
And in all of it, I remember thinking “A cow? What is a cow doing here? Coming out of the fog and disappearing like that?”
All I know is: there was something just abjectly beautiful and patently absurd about that cow just materializing out of the dark. Kind of like life itself...:)
“A Cow?”
Gratiot Ave. East of 12 Mile Road, Roseville.
Great old days when record departments had aisle after aisle of every category of music.
I must say your post was udderly mooooooooving.🐄🐄🐄🐄
Lol, cows do that to me…:)
The closest any other country comes to this whole kind of experience or nostalgia is Great Britain, in their attitude to Australian colonials...though, the Brits are not always very respectful in their reference to "diggers". You can see that if you watch "Gallipoli' or "Breaker Morant"
We had cows, yes, they can if motivated.
Lived on a farm, chased many cattle in my time
only the black cows
I watched that and thought the same thing.
That was an extremely dynamic situation-it could have quickly gone sideways...glad it didn’t!
Wranglers?? No wonder they had such a problem.
On the cattle drives, the wranglers job was to manage the cavy, the spare horse herd. They could help with the cattle in a pinch, but may or may not have been as handy.
Certainly it would help for these guys to have had a horse that was experienced in herding. A good cow pony can read the cattle and know which way to jump before the cow does, and the rider better be paying attention!
But wranglers?? Does anyone know who’s what and what that is?
Wranglers are jeans
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