Me vs The Cows

***I wrote this while still at our rental house. Thankfully this hasn’t been a problem at the new place. Yet. 

But so help me, next time I will have steaks!

I came home a few nights ago and almost ran over a cow.  No, I was not mistakenly driving through a field in a drunken haze. I was coming up my driveway. To my house. Where there should be no cows.

Yes, that is what you think it is.

Ever.

But there were cows, and a lot of them, depositing fertilizer all over the lawn, the driveway, and the walkway to the house.

The thing about these cows that put me on edge, besides their propensity for nonchalant trespassing, was that they couldn’t seem to decide if they should run at the car, or away from it.  And to be clear, these were not your average milk cows, they had long and unambiguously pointy horns. I didn’t like my chances if they chose fight over flight. Fortunately, they opted for the latter, but they took their sweet fucking time making up their minds.

Because I didn’t really know what else to do, I reported the cows to the RCMP, and found out that yes, cows are a legitimate police call out here in my rural eddy of BC. Apparently cows on the road are a real problem. I’ve since been told that you would be better off running your car off the road than hitting a cow. Not only do you owe the farmer money for the cow you hit, but also for future cow crotch-fruit that would have come from that original now-dead cow. I don’t know how much truth there is to that, but I can see a booming business selling cow insurance in my future. In any case, very little could actually be done about the cows, but if they moved onto the road, someone would come out to deal with them.

I listened to the sweet serenade of cow-speak for the rest of the night.

The next morning the cows were still around, but had moved to a lesser used part of the property. Carry on cows, carry on.  We left for the day and hoped they would continue their journey to anywhere else by the time we came back.

Nope. Nope, nope, nope.

Cattle guard, you had ONE JOB!

The deuce-dropping monsters had returned in all their poop-creating glory. There were at least 15 of them, all staring stupidly at me, unsure of what to do. The smarter ones (and I use that term lightly), wandered off towards the bushed, but three of the more dim witted ones wouldn’t move, and jealously guarded my front door. One particularly challenged cow wandered into our side yard and promptly got himself stuck. Turning around and retreating was apparently outside his intellectual scope.

I felt like I was part of a really off-book hostage situation. I certainly wasn’t going to get out of the car with these huge, yet incredibly stupid animals diligently trampling my yard, but I also really didn’t relish the idea of camping in my car.  

My van was between them and freedom, and participating in a stampede really wasn’t part of my plan for the day. It took 10 minutes of inching forward and reversing back again to coax them out of the yard and back into the woods.  In part to make them go away, but mostly to make myself feel better, I chased them through the transitional field with my van, honking like a crazy person. Because fuck you, that’s why.

I feel like I won that round.

In the end, the biggest loser was the trampled watering system, the lawn, and the archway at the front of the house, which has a much steeper lean to it than I think it safely should. Happily the cows were returned home, and their fence escape route repaired. The next time I see a cow, it had better be on my plate in the form of a medium rare steak.