At first, she thought the breath of air on the back of her neck was just a playful breeze; hot and tantalizingly moist.
Then came the tongue.
Long, nubby and slick with saliva, the tongue snaked under her ear, wrapped around a lock of hair and pulled.
In that moment, she knew it was love – the love of an amiable cow.
So much for the opening paragraphs of Flustered in the Fescue, a never-to-be completed novella about animals known to every cow-calf producer. Perhaps bottle-fed as calves or stemming from a genetic line of gentle bovines, it seems there’s a “pet” in many herds. They’ll approach in the pasture or corrals with their own brand of affection, be it a lick, a bunt or a neck extended for a scratch.
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So it may have been for Efram Hug and Julie, a crossbred Shorthorn heifer.
Hug, a builder of packaging equipment, lives in Vancouver, works in Delta and keeps a herd of about 20 head with his parents on their Lillooet, B.C., farm.
Among them was Julie, a seven-month-old halter-broken heifer.
“She’s really tame,” says Hug. “Her entire line, starting with her grandmother, were all pets.”
But on Oct. 9, Hug says his father did some housecleaning. Julie was sold via the Western Cattle Company out of Kamloops and between Oct. 9 and 19 ended up “somewhere in an Alberta feedlot.”
Hug wants her back.
There’s capacity for 1.58 million animals in Alberta feedlots, so finding Julie will be a tall order. Hug knows that but in efforts to find Julie, he sent an e-mail and the photo below to The Western Producer.
“You’d think with all this ID stuff, that you could track things much more easily,” he observed, when we called to get details.
Julie should have a Canadian Cattle Identification Agency tag by now but of course it’s unknown whether she retains the 6P.
If found, Hug says he will buy Julie back. And he has a new home picked out for her, among other Shorthorns, near Langley, B.C. He can be reached at rx7man@gmail.com or at 778-233-7141.
