By Marc J. Elzenbeck
“All creatures great and small,
All things bright and beautiful;
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all.”
Sipping a second cup of coffee at around 10:00 a.m., the phone rang. The caller said, “So, your cow. She wrecked my truck.” Stronger words may have been used. Bottom line, our girl really “liked” the rancher’s truck, denting the front fenders and breaking out the grill.
Normally, you’d wonder how on earth that would be possible. Question motive, means, and opportunity, maybe presume your animal’s innocence. Did the truck give its consent? Was it a case of entrapment? Was the suspension lifted? But I knew right away what had happened. Evasion was pointless. All I said was: “Yep. Is it an old white Ford?”
The cow in question, Leslie Lou “Minnie” Moo, a devious, double-sized rescue Holstein I privately christened Cowzilla, had escaped again, only this time with her calf Nettie in tow. They went straight to the nearest bull in Paradise Valley, as if they looked up driving directions on their iPhones.
Farmer George kept a good-sized herd and agreed to let them stay for awhile. It was an extended spa visit for the cows, and a vacation for us. We basked in blessed quietude. Our diaphragms did not vibrate to cowtankerous and deep 100-decibel moos.
An hour after first arriving to our farm, Leslie had high-jumped a perfectly good fence. She aimed to re-unite with her high school sweetheart, a handsome white Scottish Highland bull. Spooked by alarmed motorists on Cemetery Road, she took a fateful turn and fell down high-banked cliffs to the Colvos Passage. Shaken and scrappy, in the tricky rescue process, Leslie smashed a closed gate apart like a linebacker on a blind-side blitz. One of its sharp edges caught her haunch as a blade, flaying deep and long.
Disoriented and drenched in bright red blood, things didn’t look very good for Leslie. The Cow Rescue Posse mulled through several bad options. The torn gate had somehow not hit an artery in her thick shoulder, but it was hanging open, inoperable.
We considered the obvious: killing and eating her. Which might seem like a simple solution, but for a mammal weighing in at a ton and a half, it isn’t. How long it would take to butcher, say, 20 deer?
More so, while I was led to expect a chaste, virginal Holstein, Leslie was pregnant on arrival. The first step was to wrangle her back into the pasture. But she had just jumped its four-foot high fence so easily the only trace was a tail-hair strand. We’d have to rope her in, then “beef up” the fence.
The patent for barbed wire was awarded in 1874 to Joseph Glidden, a widower in DeKalb County, Illinois. By vastly reducing the cost of traditional fencing, his invention sped up the settling of the West with livestock. Suddenly, ranchers could just sink shallow posts, string a few strands of wire across and go play banjo in the bunkhouse. When Glidden died aged 93 in 1906, he was one of the richest men in the Americas.
Barbed wire has a lot of pros, but one big con. It will seriously injure animals (or people) determined enough to pass through it, and the last thing we wanted was another gash. We upgraded the fencing with electric, attaching a sender box strong enough to zap 40 miles of wire.
Leslie soon learned that her Olympic hurdling days were over, and grudgingly stayed put. In a few months she birthed a calf in a dense stand of stinging nettles. Hence, we called her “Nettie.”
Things went well enough, but Leslie, being prone to powerful urges, was not about to retire. She spotted a weakness. The gate chain was hooked to a nail. She unhooked that chain with her tongue and used her head to lift the gate inwards, and it was off to Farmer George’s, with Nettie. Life will out. Moo-tations will ensue. We were happy to let them do so, but as you might suspect, we were wrong yet again.
Farmer George’s bull was a Dexter, bred for compactness. Whereas Leslie, well, she was a tall glass of water. By all accounts, and not for lack of trying, including climbing on rocks and stumps, their difference in stature disallowed mating mechanics. So, Leslie was even more frustrated than before.
Which leaves the truck. I knew what happened because she did much the same to my F150. On that tumble down the Colvos, Leslie detached her left retina. To her one good eye, an old white pickup looks like a big bull named Brad Pitt. One she greets with alarming enthusiasm.
Drive into the pasture to drop off a bale or pick up a tree branch, and you’re faced with a Cow Torpedo. She’ll jump in front of your truck, making pirouettes with her back hooves in the air, nudging the fenders and making dainty moos. And leave an old white pickup parked in her pasture? Especially if it’s shiny, that’s a temptation she just can’t pass up.
