Billings, Montana. She’s dead a bit earlier than planned, felled by a sniper to prevent more folks from getting injured. The cow escaped while being unloaded to be sent to the auction yards. This rarely happens, but every once and a while cattle prove they have not yet had all the fight bred out of them. It is also something to consider when people talk about dangerous wolves in the state, who have never hurt anyone, one of the few middle sized to large animals for which that can be said.
Here are the details from the Billings Gazette, Runaway cow shot by police. By Carmen Irish.
Ralph Maughan
Dr. Ralph Maughan is professor emeritus of political science at Idaho State University. He has been a Western Watersheds Project Board Member off and on for many years, and also its President. For many years he produced Ralph Maughan's Wolf Report. He was a founder of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition. He and Jackie Johnson Maughan wrote three editions of "Hiking Idaho." He also wrote "Beyond the Tetons" and "Backpacking Wyoming's Teton and Washakie Wilderness." He created and is the administrator of The Wildlife News.
Poor thing… She obviously wasn’t into the program of the slaughter house blues and wasn’t interested in what the humans had in store for her… Gosh, even Sarah Palin pardoned a turkey. I’d have to say that this could be a case of an event that may have, if it wasn’t ended with a bullet, a case of fair chase! She obviously knew that it was humans who were a danger to her and she went after them. 😉
Good for the cow, making a run for it, and dying on at least better terms than in a slaughterhouse.
Definitely the winner of this year’s Patrick Henry travelling trophy … best exemplifying the ” Give me Liberty or Give me Death ” veneration .
We should play Follow the Money now and see who pays, or gets compensated for, this impromptu rodeo. Or who blames it on predators , or maybe huffs tongue in cheek about those ‘ illegal nonnative imported nonessential experimental population’ bovines.
YEars ago in Cody we used to begin Cody Stampede week with a cattle drive down 8 blocks of main street …about 15 cowboys and 30 momma cows with calves or proven domestic demeanor. Nothing too wild…. until for whatever reason the cows broke ranks and started off into the neighborhoods and back alleys. I got a priceless photo of several of them queued up in the drive-in banking lanes of a local bank, which the bank used as advertising .
Down in jackson Hole where the cowboy images is somewhat more difficult to pull off with a straight face, THEIR loittle cattle drive thru town turned into a rodeo one year. Cows busted out and split in all directions. The one old heifer who ended up on the second story of the Broadway Square boutiques was the most challenging to wrangle…she had charged up the wide timbered staircase heading for freedom , only to find a mezzanine full of startled tourists amid upscale boutique shops. A compatriot cow ended up in the bottom of a big deep trench being dug to replace a sewer main.
THAT , folks ,is what ” Real Western ” looks like these days.
Cows certainly haven’t had all the fight bred out of them. These photos of cows working over a black bear in an Oregon pasture hit the news a couple of years ago. As Bob Jackson would opine, these domestic bovines appear to have fully functional “social infrastructure”:
http://www.animal-space.net/2010/09/black-bear-vs-cows.html