A Mooving Story

On Monday, I posted a wonderful and utterly unexpected video of a cow joyously playing game of fetch, racing after a ball and kicking it back to its human. (If you missed it, you can check it out here.) 
 
The video was all the more funny to me, since it was related to a story of why I was so especially amazed seeing a cow run so fast, since my observation had always been that they just slowly lope along.  And that was brought home so vividly when I was driving along the Maine countryside.  This was in 1988, when I was working on the Stephen King movie Pet Sematary during my dark days doing unit publicity.  I had a day off, and when tooling through the countryside, I saw a group of cows off in the distance of a very large, open field.  I stopped the car, and got out to look at them.  (Which by itself is probably an odd thing for most people to do, I would imagine.  “Hey, let’s stop the car and look at cows!!” is not a phrase too-often heard, I wouldn't think.)
 
Anyway, as I stood looking at these cows, I noticed that one began very slooooowly meandering towards me.  And then another.  And another.  And then one-by-one, almost all of them.  It was a very big field, so it took a long time, maybe three or four minutes for them so ploddingly made their way over.  And once they all got there – they simply stopped at the fence and starred at me.  And stayed there starring.
 
It was hilarious and adorable.  But it also drove home a couple points for me – how social and curious cows were, which I’d never had a sense of.  Social and curious enough to want to see that human person over there a couple hundred yards away.  And social enough for all of them to want to do it together.
 
But it’s that memory of how slooooooowly they all lugged their way over which stood out and made the video of that one cow running around playing “fetch” so hilarious and wonderful to me.
 
And as semi-proof of it all, when the cows all stood by the fence looking at me, I took a picture -- and here it is!  You can see in the background where some other cows are how far then came.  And you can even see a few more cows still making their way over.
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