Cows and pies

The Best of Stubble Mulch

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Most of the cows I’ve known were kind, slobbery and docile.

I remember seeing a rodeo brahama bull that had escaped from the pen jump clean over champion cowboy Casey Tibbs’ Cadillac, but your average bossies I hung around with couldn’t jump over a peahen.

I once participated in a SDSU faculty/staff steer ride on a mount that was either tame, drugged or near death. I was doing just fine until some rodeo clown hit the critter with one of those hotshot devices. 

I landed with a splat on my back, because I landed in something that the steer had just deposited on the rodeo arena floor. 

We volunteer cowboys were issued football helmets for protection, but because of possible injury to any faculty and staff members dumb enough to volunteer, the annual faculty steer rides during the Jackrabbit Stampede have been discontinued. 

My cushioned landing on a cow pie in that ungainly fall from my tired and senile steer reminded me of walking the Pony Hills pastures in Wessington Springs barefoot on chilly mornings long ago rounding up cows for milking. 

On the drive, we’d scout out the most recently deposited cow pies still steaming in the chill fall air, and warm our cold feet by standing in them.

On a good day we could walk for blocks without our feet ever touching the ground. 

Now I’m learning that we were walking in an awful offal minefield. We could easily have blown ourselves to smithereens, or maybe to nearby Woonsocket, which to Springonians then was just a step up from the dreaded smithereens. 

I know now of the danger we faced because of a news article a friend from New Zealand sent me. This New Zealand farmer and his family were out inspecting their brand-new cow when, blammo, without warning, the thing just flat-out exploded on them.

They were splattered with hamburger and the blast drenched them in blood, the report said.

A spontaneously exploding cow is not a common sight. I’ve never seen one and chances are you haven’t either. The distraught farmer is suing the breeder of the New Zealand animal for selling him what his lawyer described in court papers as a “defective cow.”

About the same time that I was reading about this defective cow from down under, I read of a Colorado animal scientist whose life’s work has been studying the gas of cows. 

For over 20 years he’s wrinkled his nose, turned his head, held his breath and studied gaseous emittances known to veterinarians who are in mixed company as flatulance. 

He’s discovered that a cow emits from 200 to 400 quarts of methane gas every day of its life. 

That ain’t chopped liver, folks. If you take into account all of the cows in the world, we’re talking something like 50 million metric tons of methane gas building up out there quick as a hiccup.

The scientist says that he has personally never witnessed the self-destruction of a cow similar to what happened in New Zealand, but he’s apparently put his life on the line many times demonstrating to students the manner and means of methane gas eruptions.

His demonstration involves holding a lighted candle in the vicinity of the rear portion of a cow, which are known to veterinarians when they are in mixed company as “rumps.”  He claims that there is often enough methane rump “erupting” to sustain a blue flame for several seconds. 

With all this danger lurking in the one or more stomachs of every cow in the world, there is always a possibility of an explosion, he says. That’s why I mentioned the cow pie hopping habits we had as kids.

We never worried about flatulence of our cows. That was no big deal. 

But finding warm cow pies.  

Hey, that was a big deal.

If you’d like to comment, email the author at cfcecil@swiftel.net.