What Can We Learn from a Cow?

No one would identify their favorite pet as being a cow. I don't know about you, but my daughter has never wished upon a star that a bovine would be corralled out in our backyard, all to herself. I've never heard any other pony-tailed lass yearn for a four-stomached heifer. Horses and ponies take that category hands down.

Although rarely the focus of a child's aspiration, the cow, or Carolus Linnaeus if you prefer, is vastly underrated.

We can learn much from this slow-moving meadow walker. How much money did you disgorge on your last trip to the zoo? No doubt you shelled out a hefty sum of cash to see a variety of animals that are not native to you. Some striped, wooly, annoyed thing that sat in the corner maybe. Or a giant, dirty elephant with flies in its ears that stared at you, urinated on the ground and then sauntered away. Did you pay the additional amount to have one of these animals come over and slurp a heap of nuts off your hand? I know you did. What joy that can be; a dim-witted herbivore salivating on your arm up to the elbow.

I took a trip to the Toronto zoo a few years back. A wonderful zoo for sure. But throughout the zoo, we kept seeing signs for the "Naked Mole Rats," evidently some type of rare rodent. I wasn't sure I wanted to see any mole or rat, much less one considered nude. Nevertheless, the intense advertisement piqued our interest, so we followed the arrows and found them.

Housed in a small cage, with a little visible window the size of a bank teller's drive-thru drawer, we saw the naked mole rats. They were about 8 centimeters long, white, hairless, hideously ugly and all heaped up atop one another like some albino wrestling match. I think they were dead too.

It demonstrated to me that just because some animal is touted as an "attraction," it doesn't mean you're going to learn anything. In my opinion, if you've seen a rat, seen a mole, and been naked, then you're already clued in on the whole thing.

Yet, the model and definitive ideal for society is actually just roaming around, hanging out along our thruways, chewing on clumps of grass. Why do I say this? Because one can learn much from the cow. Patience, as an example.

If I had to stand in, or within visible distance of my excrement, with flies buzzing around me like Japanese Kamikaze pilots dive-bombing warships during the Pacific campaign of WWII, I would lose my patience. If I were shoved into a stall the size of a handicap bathroom for half the day, with some stranger clutching and grabbing at my privates and trying to coax a dairy product to come out, I would lose my patience. If I had a hot branding iron rammed against my oversized rear so that if I was ever outside my fence and naked everyone would know me, with my ear pierced with some giant pin the equivalent size of a ski pole and then fitted with a phone book size tag, I can tell you, in all honesty, I would lose my patience.

What do cows do? They just moo.