(Un)holy Cow!

 

There’s no else one around in this idyllic place. I see my orange covered knee against the blue of the sky and the clouds float gently by. When I have had my fill of gazing up at the sky, I lie in the tree and observe it’s skin. Sshshshsh-the wind rustles through the leaves. Holy cow who is that in a car rupturing my meditations with a big RRRRRRR. This is a place for mooooos and chirpy chirp and baa…baa…. and sshshshshsh. It’s a man in the driver’s seat with a map. I ask him what’s up. He says he’s looking for his lost cows. He’s the farmer who owns the farm that spreads out before me, where deer duck in the wheat fields when they see me approach with my camera. Thirteen of his cows have wandered off and cannot be found. It’s summer and they are not expected to stay in a barn. Anyway, the barn is a cinema house these days. In the winter it’s a storage shed. And the cows in winter? Where do they live? Oh, they’re slaughtered by then. These unholy wayward cows were transported in a big van from the north of Sweden for the farmer who bought them. They’re summer cows who roam the open meadows eating up the grass and weeds that otherwise threaten this idyllic landscape. They protect the open meadows and get fat in return. In October, they will be meat. The farmer gets a subsidy from the EU (barely enough, he says) to let them wander and chew and moo.

I could, I suppose offer to let some folks ‘back home’ in India know about this. There’s every chance they would kindly offer to adopt these unholy cows when they are eventually found. Like they offered to adopt the ones who got mad cow disease. Flying mad cow cows a few thousand miles to convert them from unholy to holy cows and place them in palliative care till the end of their (sad) days.