A recent road closure and detour on my way to work brings me by a new farm. On Friday afternoon, as I was driving home, I noticed the cows out in the pasture. These cows, I had never seen before, and I've seen A LOT of cows. Not that I can claim any real knowledge of cows. Growing up in rural Minnesota, I've simply seen a lot of them.
At a quick glance as I was driving by, it looked as though the entirely black cows had something white wrapped around their bellies.. I took a second glance just to make sure I wasn't mistaken (I admit that I like to be right sometimes), and again, what I saw was a bunch of black cows, all with the same white stripe wrapping around their bellies. My first thought was, "Who would wrap something around a cow?" I couldn't come up with an explanation for why a farmer would put something like that on a cow, but I knew it was something unnatural. Because, no group of cows look exactly the same, right?
The first person I told about the cow phenomena was, of course, my mom. I knew she was driving by the same cows each day, and I needed her to confirm my suspicions about this shady cow farmer. So together, we drove by the cows in question one morning on our way to the cities (that's Minneapolis and St. Paul for those of you outside MN) for some shopping. As soon as she saw them, my mom declared that the white stripe on the cows was natural. In fact, in a mocking voice (much like my own...), she said, "What, do you think they wrapped those poor cows to keep them warm?" After recovering from the shock of hearing my own sarcasm coming straight from my mother's lips, I recognized the situation for what it was. The perfect opportunity for a bet. The perfect opportunity for me to be right.
The bet was this: After our day of shopping, we would drive by the cows a second time, but stop to take a closer look. Whoever ended up being wrong about the stripe on the cows would make dinner that night. If we couldn't figure it out, we'd go out to dinner. So after hours of walking in the wrong direction around IKEA (Have you ever gotten dirty looks from IKEA shoppers for walking against the flow of those arrows on the floor? I have.), we were on our way back to the cows. Not really considering how we might appear, we parked our car on the side of the country road and trudged through the long grass in the ditch to get a better look. I had to put my glasses on (that's how much I didn't want to make dinner that night) to investigate. Once in close range, it was very clear that each cow had an identical stripe of white hair (fur?) growing around its belly. What?! Ridiculous. *Someone is out there breeding *crazy striped cows, and now I have to cook dinner and admit that I was wrong.
*By "someone", I guess I mean the American Galloway Breeders Association, and by "crazy striped cows", I suppose I mean Galloway cattle.
2 comments:
We had a couple of farmers raising these near our totally remote farm in central Minnesota. :) We knew they were Galloways but we used to call them the Hampshire cows because they look like cow versions of Hampshire pigs: http://www.ansi.okstate.edu/breeds/swine/.
There's a farm near Berthoud, CO that also raises them and calls them Oreo cattle.
I'd take it as a good omen that you found yourself some Scottish cows not long before your trip!
Kels and I grew up calling this variety ... "the oreo cows". But those look double-stuffed :)
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