Cows Gone Wild
This is an epilogue to a previous article
I wrote about slaughterhouse escapees, who always seem to capture the
world's attention in a way that other, more generic farmed animals do
not.
Recently added to the list of famously frisky farm fugitives
is a 6-year-old cow named Yvonne, who escaped from a German farm last
May just before she was to be shipped off for slaughter.
Yvonne
eluded capture for three months, which to me indicates either an
abundance of hiding places in the Bavarian countryside or a searching
strategy with more holes than (dare I say it?) Swiss cheese. She even
had her own " poster:
Electric
fences, road traffic, helicopters, infrared cameras, hunters (who for
awhile were given permission to shoot her on sight), police officers and
other searchers were no match for Yvonne. She even resisted the lure of
the masculine musk of Ernst, who was called "the George Clooney of
bulls. (But given Clooney's famous aversion to commitment, maybe Yvonne
knew instinctively that it wouldn't work out.)
Even when she was
finally found near a group of cows on another farm, Yvonne didn't
surrender quietly; it took several men with tranquilizer darts, ropes
and a truck to move her to the Gut Aiderbichi sanctuary that had
purchased her safety, as well as that of her 2-year-old son, Friesi. She
now has lifelong comfort -- and her own webcam.
But
my favorite part of this story isn't just that Yvonne was ultimately
saved from slaughter -- it's the characterization of her during three
months on the run.
Modern action heroes have nothing on Yvonne.
She jumped in front of a police car, and then eluded the officers. She
dodged a helicopter with heat-sensing cameras. German authorities
declared her a security risk.
NPR called her "an incandescent symbol of freedom and animal dignity." A hunter who came face-to-face with Yvonne told sanctuary owner Michael Aufhauser that "he looked into her eyes and she looked back like a wild animal, not a dairy cow." The Der Spiegel
newspaper reported that the same stalker "reported that she now looks
more like a buffalo than a cow, and has evidently turned into a wild
animal in her months on the run." (She escaped him unharmed.) Yvonne was
called "an increasingly shaggy wild beast."
She became, quite
frankly, a badass bovine. You gotta cheer for that! Bulls (usually under
the duress of a rodeo or bullfight) occasionally get some respect, but
cows? Hardly ever.
[I should note, however, that "Far Side" artist
Gary Larson did a great service to cattle when he depicted them in many
of his cartoons. One of my favorites shows several cows in a field
standing up and talking; when a car approaches, they drop to all fours
and pretend to eat grass. When the car passes, they resume standing and
talking. Another shows a farmer walking into a dark barn where two cows
are studying a diagram of a man divided into "shoulder chops" and "spare
ribs," with the head delightfully designated as "throw away."]
Yvonne
helped demand more respect for cows. She wasn't going to let her life
get thrown away. Whatever consciousness she has of her existence, she
made deliberate choices that put her pursuers to shame.
What
should shame the rest of us is any acceptance of animals as disposable
commodities. Yvonne's former owners wanted to convert her from being a
milk machine into being a meat machine, which is the ultimate fate of
most dairy cows. The vast majority of these animals don't get freedom or
Facebook fame, they just get used and killed by the millions.
So
even though Yvonne lost the battle for total independence, she won a
moral victory and recruited an army of supporters. May she not be the
last of the cows gone wild.
Yvonne, safe at the sanctuary but perhaps still wild at heart 
Jill Howard Church, 9/12/11
Published by admin on 12/26/2011 12:39:36
