Bodacious Bovines

While witnessing the 100th Annual Mexican Fiesta in Garden City, I thought I was being given a fist bump from a man in the parade when I was suddenly thrust a foam cow.

Awkwardly, I clutched the cow in one hand while fumbling with my phone in the other, trying to continue taking pictures.

I should have seen it coming. I was once a ‘holy cow’ for Halloween. As a child in Slovakia, I remember playing freeze-tag with cows. So it was really the accumulation of karmic debt that led me to a recent stand-off with a few cows in Grant County.

Because the evening sun was blinding my line of sight, I parked my car halfway down a ditch. Driven by impulse, I began taking selfies with a particularly solid and stoic-looking Angus.

My philosophical neurons began churning.

What does an Angus beast think about? What hopes and dreams lie behind those bovine eyes, besides greed and gluttony?

No cow but one stared at me.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Bovita Bonita. But they call me B.B. because I’m hotheaded like a BB gun.”

I couldn’t tell whether she was pregnant or fat. She was certainly round-shaped.

“Are you expecting?”

“I’ve been milking.”

“Is that the same thing?”

She huffed.

The rule applies to cows: never ask a lady if she’s pregnant.

“It’s udder-ly none of your business.”

“Can I try cow tipping you?”

“Don’t even try to beef with me.”

And apparently, cows have personalities.

Cows can be curious, timid, or bold. They form social bonds and can even develop a best friend.

“Do you have a best friend?”

“Yes.”

“What’s her name?”

“Betty Moop.”

“Huh?”

“Like Betty Boop. But with a moo. She’s a bit insular.”

“What do you do together?”

“Parallel play. Eat alfalfa.”

“You don’t play, like, cops and robbers?”

“What, with you taking mugshots?”

She nodded toward my phone.

Cows also have remarkable vision. They possess an almost 360-degree field of view, with only a small blind spot behind them.

“So you can see almost everything?”

“Have to keep a lookout in case I have to be on the mooove.”

“Oh, really? What color is this?”

I showed her a traffic light.

She furrowed her brows.

“I guess it’s fortunate I have four legs and not four wheels.”

Although cows are red-green colorblind, their sense of smell is well developed. They can detect odors from several miles away.

“So if someone forgot deodorant…”

“Oh God.”

Cows even have four-chambered stomachs, allowing them to digest tough plant material through fermentation and rumination.

“So you eat for four?”

“Yet you manage it.”

Humans have had a complicated relationship with cattle.

“But we’ve come a long way,” said Milky Way, a wizardly looking cow with a white star on the top of his head, catching my discomfort.

In prehistoric societies, cattle represented food and survival. Ancient Egyptians associated bulls with prosperity, while Greeks and Romans connected them with sacrifice and mythology. As agriculture developed, cattle became working animals and measures of economic security. During the Renaissance, artists turned them into symbols of pastoral simplicity.

By the 19th century, selective breeding produced increasingly enormous, blocky cattle, exaggerated in paintings to display their owners’ status.

“Look up ‘19th-century rectangular cow paintings,’” said B.B. “Those are our equivalents of caricatures.”

Art gave cows still more meanings. Picasso used a bull in Guernica to convey the brutality of war. In religious traditions, the Golden Calf symbolized idolatry, the Minotaur made the bull monstrous, while Hindu traditions associated the cow with life-giving and nonviolence.

Ironically, cows have come to symbolize seemingly opposite things.

“Humans really like making cows mean things,” B.B. said.

“Humans like making things mean things in general,” Milky Way noted.

We also really like making cows celebrities.

There is the Laughing Cow, Chick-fil-A’s “Eat Mor Chikin” campaign, and the bull of Wall Street.

“One moment you worship us,” said B.B. “The next we’re a commodity.”

“Pretty much,” I admitted.

“Y’all are weird for that.”

Sometimes, however, a cow is just ridiculous, whether by itself or made so.

“Hey Diddle Diddle,” first printed in 1765, featured a cow that “jumped over the moon.”

Mrs. O’Leary’s cow was accused of starting the Great Chicago Fire in 1871, only to be exonerated later. In 1880, there was even a song called “The Tone the Old Cow Died On,” advertised as “The Funniest Song Ever Published!” Pauline was President Taft’s cow and the last cow to live at the White House. 

Then came Elsie, Borden’s cartoon “spokescow,” who became a live celebrity around the 1939 World’s Fair. She celebrated her birthday at New York City’s Hotel Roosevelt and even received honorary degrees.

Cows were later catapulted at castles in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) and sent flying through tornadoes in Twister (1996), with the line, “I gotta go. We got cows.”

There are criminal cows, too.

Cincinnati Freedom, a 1,050-pound Charolais, escaped a Cincinnati slaughterhouse in 2002 by leaping a six-foot fence. She evaded police for 11 days before being captured.

“That was a bit udder-thought,” B.B. told me. “I myself am a smooth creaminal. You just have to know how to milk the system.”

“How?”

“Well, once I got stuck in a swimming pool trying to escape. Instead of getting charged, I got rescued by multiple crews.”

Cows have even paved their way into the tech world. In 1965, cows repeatedly trespassed onto NASA’s Mississippi Test Facility, eating and trampling grass around the site. One NASA memo described them as “willful trespassers” who ignored signs declaring the area restricted government property.

“Just act like you can’t read,” B.B. said. “No taxes then.”

I decided to walk down the road to another pasture.

I recognized her before I greeted her. Betty Moop was on the left side of the pen, separated from the herd.

“Why are you alone?”

“I’m taking some time for myself.”

“Why?”

“Because I can.”

She chewed.

The sun sank toward the horizon, casting rosy shadows across the pasture.

“What are you thinking about?”

“Grass.”

“That’s it?”

I looked at her. She looked at me.

“So what are you doing?” she asked.

“Trying to understand you.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re interesting.”

“I’m eating grass. My friends are eating grass. The sun is going down.”

“Yes?” I pressed.

“And that is enough.”

I reflected, wondering if we gradually lose the ability to ‘just be.’

Children can befriend an imaginary friend, make kingdoms out of clouds, and inspect ants under a rock without needing it to lead anywhere. Adults can seem to want everything to be useful, meaningful, or impressive.

For all that cows have come to represent, from Wall Street wealth, agricultural labor, the sacred in Hinduism, the monstrous in mythology, absurdity in nursery rhymes, and charm in the misspellings of fast-food slogans, a cow, in reality, lives simply and in the present.

Being present doesn’t require knowing very much. Sometimes it means recognizing how little we know or control, still being able to laugh at the absurdity of it all, and going on.

Betty Moop and I exchanged knowing glances. She shook off a fly buzzing around her ear.

Just before Betty Moop returned to the herd, she snorted beneath her breath:

“And get your car out of the ditch.”