Cow Chips: Jumping Cow

Sometime after we had the experience with the calf that liked to jump fences we encountered a cow that I named Jumping Cow. This cow was a little skittish and whenever you got too close to her she would go find a fence to jump over, usually causing a lot of damage and you guessed it, a lot of swearing. Most of the time when you have a cow like this they will settle down and not be as bad after a while. Not this cow, it seems that the more time that passed the worse she got, she got to the point that when you drove up to feed the cows she would start looking for a fence to jump over. Her calf was starting to learn the art of jumping as well so we promptly weaned the calf to get it away from its mother’s influence.

At one point this particular cow jumped one fence too many and got on my brother’s nerves for the last time, he called a local butcher and set up an appointment with the Jumping Cow. When I was a kid I remember more than one cow that we took to visit “Uncle Lewis” or Lewis Meats that local meat packing company that was near our home. Unfortunately Uncle Lewis has gone When the butcher went to shot this particular cow the first shot did not kill her. She almost jumped out of the corral before he could shoot her again. This time the cow did not learn to not jump fences and she ended up as hamburger in our freezers.

The thing that made me decide to include this story is what happened later. I was helping my wife make meat loaf for Sunday dinner and as she looked at me with my hands in the mixture of meat loaf I had a funny little smirk on my face. Of course she wanted to know what the smirk was about so I explained that I was enjoying making a meat loaf out of this miserable pain in the neck cow. I was also thinking about how good she was going to taste and the satisfaction that I was going to feel being able to eat her. It was a very good meat loaf and very satisfying. I made sure to let everyone who ate any part of that cow after that know it was “Jumping Cow”. Right now I wish we had another unruly cow since the meat in my freezer is not as plentiful and defiantly doesn’t taste as good as this particular cow did.