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At the ripe age of 23, when I was a roving reporter at the Preston Citizen (the same town that inspired the film Napoleon Dynamite) I wrote a cute lil' story about some kids at a local livestock auction who had grown attached to their animals after raising them in 4-H.

Dusty Kids in Wranglers and cowboy boots with sunburnt faces and wind-blown hair said their last goodbyes to their cows, pigs and lambs at the Preson Country Fair on Friday night. But eleven year old Adam Swann wasn't ready to say goodbye to his friendly bucket cow Big Red.

Adam was planning on sleeping overnight at the fairgrounds with his cow before they took him away, but the man who bought Big Red had to leave town, so he took the cow earlier than planned.

“Adam asked where his cow was,” Adam's dad, Lyle, said. “So I told him, and he was just broken-hearted. He didn't get to sleep until 11 p.m. and it was out of exhaustion.”

Adam said it was hard to let Big Red go because he had become a friend. “He'd put his nose up to me. He didn't care if I put my arms around his neck and hugged him or kinda leaned against him if I was tired,” said Adam.

“Everywhere he went, the cow went with him,” said Lyle.

Christie Owen, who won Reserve Champion with her steer, Dusty, said she'd been working with her cow all summer. Owen spent time Thursday hair-spraying and combing her cow's hair for the upcoming auction where Dusty would be showcased as one of the finest to bid on.

“His hair won't go right,” said Owen, brushing the bovine's hair between its ears into a kind of mohawk. Not only was Dusty's hair stubborn, but he was stubborn too.

“He was either kicking me or licking me,” said Owen.

Buckey J McKay, 14, had raised his steer Wild Thing since its mother was killed when the calf was two weeks old. “He's the tamest pet,” said McKay. “He will follow you around and eat right out of your hand.”

Wild Thing ate anything he could find including paper and sometimes, said McKay, the cow was cannabalistic, eating hamburgers that McKay fed him.

"What you gonna do with a 1200 pound steer hanging around?”

"It wasn't too sad giving him up,” he said. “What you gonna do with a 1200 pound steer hanging around?”

McKay took second place in showmanship with Wild Thing.
Shauna Jepsen, 11, changed her 250 pound pink pig's name from Wilbur to Mike Tyson the day she took him to the fair and put him in a pen with the other pigs.

“He got into many fights with every pig he could find,” said Jepsen. The pig has a split-personality: soft-hearted Wilbur at home, but a fighter in public.

“They think he is just trying to protect me,” she explained. “He is gentle at the house. You could rub his belly and he would roll over like a dog.”

The pig was auctioned off Friday night and Shauna had to say goodbye to her friend. Now, when she gets homesick for Wilbur/Mike Tyson, she pulls out photos of him so she's not so sad.

Stuart Parkinson, extension agent for Franklin County who has seen some of the children say goodbye explains it this way: “Letting go teaches children a valuable lesson. It's when they have to walk away (from their animals) that they learn about life, about attachment and how to deal with sadness.”

Rude Cow!

4 Sep 2008 at 11:26 pm

By John Haslam

• Animals

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