April 6, 2025

Curiosity killed a cow!

Cows are dreadfully curious creatures. Farmer girl knows that; she has known it for years. Everyone knows it! It is especially bad in the springtime, we think, what with new grass coming and cows moving to new pastures and the general high-spirited excitement that spring provokes....

The farmers moved the heifers and dry cows to new pasture this week. Grazing is still not in swing, as the grass is only greening and not growing yet.... not much. Farmer feeds them their winter's ration of hay. They were all delighted with their new digs, trotting merrily through the open gates and prowling around searching for grass...... or cozy corners.... or holes in the fence... fence-jumping is always worse in springtime too, for some weird reason. Must be the spring sunshine goes to their heads.

Ida Mae moved with her companions. She is the youngest and the smallest, a small black unstampedable creature who still believes she is more special than anyone else. Curiosity hasn't killed Ida Mae yet. It would take more than curiosity to kill this little scrunt who is afraid of nothing... if she is afraid of anything, we haven't seen it yet.

The pasture was formerly occupied by horses and still hosts the henhouse. All the heifers found this extremely fascinating. They trooped around it, plowing up mud with deep imprints of many cloven hooves. They ate the hens' feed and drank all the water from the shallow pans farmer girl used for her humble down-to-earth hens, completely ignoring their own hundred-gallon water trough in the pasture, filled to the brim with clear cold fresh water. They pulled the curtains from the windows and stomped them in the mud.

Ida Mae joined happily into the fun. She meant no harm at all when she ate the hens' feed and drank their water. Ida Mae was merely curious about the hens. She would have liked to play with them! Friendly to a fault, she even poked her head into the small hen-sized door left open during the day. She did it continually, so that farmer girl worried about her hens being intimidated by Ida Mae, who is smallest of all but still much larger than any hen.

"We're not scared of her!" said the hens to farmer girl. "Oh no! But we do wish she would quit eating our feed and drinking our water! We never have any water to drink, and if you hadn't hidden our feed from her, we'd never have that either! And they all keep stomping our yard, and it's knee-deep in mud..."

It wasn't knee-deep to farmer girl yet, but she felt it was deep enough. She fenced it off, but it must have been a fence with holes. For when she went out in the evening to put the hens to bed, around the corner she came, and there right inside her beautiful new fence was Ida Mae.

Farmer girl might not have been impressed, but all the heifers were, definitely. They stood on their side of the fence, calling advice to Ida Mae, who chose to ignore it.... because it was funner to stick her head in the door.... again.... and again...