Beware the Cow!!

Three days before we go to Europe, and we seem to have picked the perfect time to visit—there’s a cow on the loose in Germany.

No, there really is.  And if New York City went gaga over a missing python, Germany’s going bonkers over the cow.

In case you haven’t heard the story (www.azcentral.com/offbeat/articles/2011/08/19/20110819berlin-loose-cow.html), a cow in the southern part of Germany—where we’ll be in a week and a half—escaped from wherever it had been and made its way down a highway, where a police car almost ran into it.  The cow wasn’t hurt; the pride of the police, not so much.  While the German authorities were trying to figure out what happened, the cow escaped into a wooded area, where every attempt to apprehend it has so far been unsuccessful.  I don’t know if that  speaks to the intelligence of German cows or the lack of the same in German police officials, but the story of the cow on the lam has captivated Germany.

Cows are something special in Germany; with (I believe) the exception of the Autobahn, they have the right-of-way on roads.  In certain portions of southern Germany, including Bavaria, where we’ll be spending a few days, you actually can’t put up fences to stop cows from either coming into or leaving your land.  Cows are free to roam where they want. . .

Even, it appears, into the path of police cars.

I have no idea why the story of the wandering cow has so captivated Germans.  If it were France or Belgium, I could see that.  After all, the French and Belgians are quintessentially “European’, with the quirky sense of humor that goes along with being European.  They would make that cow a national hero; in France, they’d probably even vote for it for president.  But the German people, despite their size and location, aren’t always “European”; in many ways (except for their love of public nudity) they’re very “American”-like in their attitudes and their actions.  They’re very business and profit-minded, and the only place I’ve ever seen Europeans wear baseball hats was in Germany, where I actually saw a German man wearing a Green Bay Packers hat.

I tell ya; those cheeseheads are everywhere.

Of course, maybe that explains why the Germans have gone gaga over the cow.  Like I mentioned before, Americans went ape over the python missing from New York’s Central Park Zoo earlier this year; there were even websites and Facebook pages devoted to it.  And while I’ve not yet found a German website devoted to the wandering cow, it wouldn’t surprise me if, assuming the wandering bovine stays wandering, that they soon start to appear.

I would hope, at least for the sake of the reputation of the German police, that the cow is captured by the time we get into southern Germany, which would be a week from Wednesday.  If not..well, you may be getting live reports from the scene of the crime.