My family ran a dairy farm for about 50 years until progress and modern agribusiness caught up with it. Don't get me stated on how Corporate America has squeezed the life out of the small dairyman.
Being around cows all those years has not endeared the bovine species to me. When you have spent some years at the aft end of hay processing plants, you begin to think of the animal as not much more than a means of producing fertilizer. In the words of a famous Japanese industrialist "Whether you are building rocket ships or taking a dump the basic process is the same. Raw materials go in one end, and the end product comes out the other."
Cows are one of the stupidest animals on the face of the Earth., which leads to


COWTALE I

Spook was a weird cow. Skittish as heck. She liked to sneak up and peer around corners or through windows. It could be startling as heck in mid winter to be out in the milking parlor and catch movement out of the corner of your eye and look up at the window to see this huge eye rolling and peering in at you. She didn't just look, she PEERED and rolled her eye. It was pretty unnerving.
Somewhere in the family is a 22 Winchester pump rifle, 1920's vintage. A sweet gun that has had a lot of ammunition put through it over the years. It has a home made stock, made out of Birch. Spook is part of the reason it has that stock.
One winter we had a porcupine that decided to pay us a visit. Problem one was that it had come to the barnyard in search of salt. There was a plentiful supply of salt on the handles of the barnyard implements, like the pitchforks and the manure shovel. We tried to discourage this by taking the juice from a bottle of canned Chilis Torridos and painting the handles to the tools. It was pretty effective, and is a remedy I have used over the years to keep dogs from chewing on things. The porky no longer was chewing on the handles, but he was still coming around the barn. The way we found out was when we were awakened in the middle of the night by a cow bellowing in pain. It was spook, and at her most curious, she had investigated the porky. She must have irked him, because she ended up with a nose full of quills. We had to take her into the milking parlor and get her head in the stanchion and get all the quills out. Porcupine quills are barbed so that they will not pull back. Most of them we pushed through her lips, but some we had to take a very sharp knife and run it along side the quill and free the quill. Spook was a little more than displeased with the proceedings, but we did manage to get it done, and escape with no more than some bruising. That was the first time.
When it happened to Spook the second time, it was worse. In fact she had a couple of quills in her tongue. I was in favor of shooting her, as a critter that downright dumb should not be allowed to live, but calmer spirits prevailed and we went through the procedure again.
The conclusion we came to was that the porcupine needed to go away. Permanently. With prejudice.
So we staked ourselves out in the barn and waited. Along came Mr. Porcupine. Uncle Fred Shot him, and he turned around and ambled away. Shop him again. He kept on going. Shot him again, and again. In fact emptied the 15 shot tube into him, and he was still ambling along. Finally Uncle Fred hit him over the head with the stock of the rifle. The stock broke, but it did the job.
We salvaged the quills, because they make nice decorations and can be used in tying trout flies. Left with the carcass, we wondered how Porcupine tasted, so we skinned him out and cooked up a haunch.
That was the foulest tasting piece of meat I have ever tasted. Old Mr. Porky had been eating the inner bark of pine trees for some time, and the taste had been infused into the meat. Sorta like eating meat marinated in Pine Sol. While it didn't make up sick, it will never make it on to the main menu.

COWTALE II

Most dairy cows do not have a real strong mothering instinct. When they give birth, the next day you take the calf away and put it in the calf pen and raise it separate from the mother. She will be a little confused and irritable for a day or so, but quickly forgets.
Not so with Angie. Angie had real strong mothering instincts, and when we took her calf away, she was not just irritable, she was downright pissed. If you had to go out in the barnyard for any reason, you double-checked to make sure where she was. She had chased people around a couple of times.
My older brother Larry and I were going to go down to the creek in back of the barn and do a little fishing. I think he was nine and I was eight. We checked out back of the barn, and Angie was not in site, so we headed across the barnyard. When we were out in the middle, we hear this bellow behind us, turn around, and here she comes. Angie had never been dehorned, so there was a very real possibility we could get hurt bad. Larry ran one direction and I ran the other. He ran for the gate, and I ran for the hay wagon. There was a piece of barbed wire across the open gate, and it hit Larry neck high, and took the feet right out from under him. It cut his heck pretty bad, so he was bleeding and screaming his lungs out. I made it safely to the hay wagon. Everyone came running at the sound of the screaming, and they bundled Larry up and ran him in to the Doc.
Which left me stranded on the hay wagon. All afternoon.
Angie would go inside the barn, and after I waited a couple of minutes, I edged to the ground, I got about four steps away from the wagon, and here she came, chasing me back. This happened a couple of times before I figured out that she was going in and peering out through the slats in the barn so she could catch me when I tried to get down. So I gave up for a while. She got tired of waiting for me to get down, so she went out into the pasture a little was, and started feeding, but she was keeping one eye on me. She managed to rush in and chase me back on to the hay wagon a couple of times. The afternoon was warm, and I got almighty thirst up there on the hay wagon.
It wasn't until close to dinner time that someone wondered "Has anyone seen Al?"