The Break-Out Queen
Buttercup got out last night just before dark. She walked right through a cedar rail fence. Very uncharacteristic; she never gives us a bit of grief. Buttercup is our Jersey milk cow. Her real name is some alphabet soup concoction like Moira Meadows Taylor-Hyde Pearce Arrow the Fourth, being a registered pure bred and all. We figured like any precocious child she was acting out: We had cut off her extended pasture the other day and she made it known that she was displeased.
We made good fences. All the animals respect them and only periodically the sheep will test a piece of rail that happens to block a tasty morsel of pasture. But they have never tried to push their way through. Buttercup simply had her mind made up.
There are tomes written about the spiritual link between horses and humans. Make no mistake, cows have one with us too, and they make it simplicity itself. It’s all about food. Grain, hay or pasture, cut me off from my supply at your peril. Bear in mind, this is a boutique operation. She is the only cow. She thinks she’s Ashley Judd at a movie premiere.
We’ve learned our lesson and she got her way. And it’s a good thing too. She hasn’t been bred in over two years but willingly takes every new bull calf we put in front of her (or rather, beside her). We get the calves free from the same dairy farmer up the road that sold Buttercup to us. Bull calves are no good in a dairy operation. So now we get tons of milk and the byproducts, cream and butter. By the fall the bull calf is all steaks and roasts, sausages and hamburger. Not bad for taking up the extra milk capacity. Sure, the calves are cute at first but then they get all ‘Bully’. It helps if you name them ‘Stew’ or ‘Sir Loinalot’. Eight months or so later it’s off to the abattoir.
I could never go back to grocery store beef. Try throwing a one inch thick blade stake on the grill from your local big box super market. You’d be lucky to cut it with a chain saw. Our calves get no corn, no phony fattening up. They’re milk and pasture fed. You can cut our blade steak with a dull butter knife. I won’t break your heart by telling you about the sirloins and prime ribs.
It was the chickens that alerted us. They’re usually good for a squawk before settling back in for the night but this ruckus was a bit too shrill. Sounded like trouble at the old barn. More like the old driveway. There was Buttercup, standing at the edge of the road, appearing to contemplate whether or not we had learned our lesson and would she spare us the indignity of trying to move her 650 pound bulk off the road. My wife as always acted more quickly than me. A shake of the grain scoop broke the spell. Food. Game over. We got her back in the barn, fixed the fence and re-opened the pasture and tried to convince ourselves that WE run the place.
