Cow Stories

Family Trip

This one's from me:

My dad took my family on a trip in Colorado, and we decided to go to a certain town to eat dinner. My dad (being the kind of guy he is) decided to take a short cut through a dirt road. This road was a lot shorter on the map than the normal road we would have taken, but it turned out to be one of those twisty, narrow roads that winds around a mountainside. Since the road was so narrow and the cliff was literally inches from the side of the car, we were really carefull not to hit cars going the opposite direction. It was hard to do this because, as I said earlier, the road wound around a mountain - we usually couldn't see more than a few yards around the next corner. So once in a while, we would see a car drive going the other way, and we'd slow down to try to get around it. About twenty miles into the road, we saw something coming around the bend. This time it wasn't a family in a car - it was a family of cows, trotting along this dirt road twenty miles up the mountain.

(Read on - the rest are a lot better than mine)

I got the next four stories from Big Dave's Cow Pages: Cow Facts.

Cow Rental Fees

In December in Singapore, a couple brought a cow and a calf on the elevator to their apartment, along with 40 relatives, to bless their new home in an ancient Hindu ceremony. The cow rental fee was $480, and the couple paid an additional $200 in cleaning costs after the cow soiled the living room during the ceremony!

Violence in Cow-lumbia

Colombia, long the world's murder capital due to drug-related deaths, now has violence spreading to farm animals. RCN Radio reported that a Holstein cow stepped on the trigger of a loaded rifle left in a field by a farm laborer, and shot another cow in the head. The injured cow is listed in critical condition at a nearby veterinary hospital.

Exploding Cows, Part 1

As the middle of the country endured its sixth day of sweltering summer heat, operators of feed lots in Iowa faced a new problem - exploding cows. The extreme heat causes gases to rapidly expand in animals after they die of heat-related distress. In many cases, they literally burst. "We've got to get them picked up right away or otherwise when you pick them up all you get is pieces," said one Iowa resident.

Exploding Cows, Part 2

Not only that, but cows can explode electrically as well. (I saw this on 60 minutes, or some such). On some old farms, the electrical wiring is old and poorly grounded. Large amounts of current will leak into the ground. Unfortunately, nearby animals (cows, you know) can be the termination points for this electricity, and they just blow up.

Flying Cows

From the Feb. 17 edition of the Globe and Mail:

February 18 is the anniversary, in 1930, of the first flight by a cow in an airplane. Elm Farm Ollie, while watched by reporters, produced milk that was put into containers and parachuted over St. Louis, MO. Welcome to the wonderful world of publicity stunts.

More Flying Cows

From Avner Leon:

A cow jumped off a 10 meter cliff onto a major highway just as a commuter bus was passing. The driver braked at the last moment, thus avoiding the cow. The said bovine landed on the asphalt, did a parachutist roll, got up and continued running. The stunned passengers got out of the bus and watched the cow canter into the sunset.

This is apparently not an isolated incident. The road passes by unfenced grazing land, and cows striving for freedom have made the leap several times.

A New Weapon For Airlifters

One of my dad's co-workers, Loren Anderson, sent this to him (I don't know where she got it)

Earlier this year, the dazed crew of a Japanese Trawler were recovered off the Sea of Japan clinging to the wreckage of their ship. Their rescue, however, was followed by immediate imprisonment once authorities questioned the sailors on their ship's loss. They claimed that a cow, falling out of the clear blue sky, had struck the trawler amidships, shattering it's hull and sinking the vessel within minutes.

They remained in prison for several weeks, until the Russian Air Force reluctantly informed Japanese authorities that the crew of one of its cargo planes had apparently stolen a cow wandering at the edge of a Siberian airfield. They forced the cow into the plane's hold and hastily departed for home. Unprepared for live cargo, the Russian crew was ill-equipped to manage a rampaging cow within its hold. To save the aircraft and themselves, they shoved the animal out of the cargo hold as they crossed the Sea of Japan at an altitude of 30,000 feet.