The Story of Emily the Cow

MIDDLESEX NEWS FRIDAY, DECEMBER 29, 1995 EMILY THE COW GIVES ‘HOOFERS’ HUNGER PANGS Carolyn Fretz Regional Editor Ashland, Holliston, Hopkinton I’ve been a carnivore extraordinaire for most of the years since I’ve had teeth. Broiled, grilled, stir-fried. Bring it on, and pass the Worcestershire, please. But now I have to reconsider. Filet-mignon. Oooooh, how divine. Or is it? Cheeseburger. Cheeseburger. Always a safe bet from an unfamiliar menu, but now I’m not so sure. And steak tartar? I don’t think so. Not anymore. Why? You know why. It’s Emily- that fence-hopping heifer from Hopkinton. Emily leaped over a 5-foot corral rail at the Arena Slaughterhouse Nov. 14- cheating death just minutes before she was scheduled to be butchered. Forty days and countless adventures later the fugitive bovine met her true density. She became a folk hero. She was spotted grazing in the woods with a herd of deer, wandering down Main Street like the moose form Northern Exposure, and feeding in the backyards of residents who learned of her plight and formed a kind of Underground Railroad for the runaway Holstein- leaving grain and hay out for her. Middlesex News reporter Rodney Schussler heard the tale, put it in the paper and soon Emily wasn’t just a local celebrity- she was a 1,600 pound media darling. I’m sure I wasn’t the only reader to start rethinking what she thought she knew about cows. A friend who kept cows in Oregon once told me he sometimes used a 4-by-4 to get their attention when he needed to load them into a trailer. Even then, he said, they were very slow to respond. It was the kind of story that might make you wonder, even if only momentarily, if cows weren’t some sort of semi-ambulatory vegetable- like eggplant, except they walk. Wonder no more. Emily’s antics endowed her with more personality, complexity and mystery than many of the two-footers who receive press attention. Why did it even occur to her to jump the gate? After all, Emily is a cow, not a cheetah or a stallion. Cows just are not the “Born Free” type. Until now, of course. What business did she have downtown on Main Street? And what about the deer she was seen with? Were they the provocateurs behind the escape? Had they been whispering to Emily from the woods under the cold November moon? Naturally saviors, now known as Friends of Emily, came forward. Meg and Lewis offered the 2-year-old heifer a home on the farm that adjoins the Peace Abbey and their school for children with special needs. And the Arena family was gracious enough to sell $500 of hamburger-on-the-hoof to the Randas for a mere $1. Throughout the saga the newsroom telephone lines have been busy with calls from people wanting to know the latest and wanting to help. And whose heart doesn’t go out to a creature so determined to stay alive and to stay free whatever the cost? We all have a few corrals we dream about leaping, but probably never will. We all want to think we could run wild and live dangerously. But we don’t have to. Emily did it for us. Until Christmas Eve, when she came out of the woods, walked up a trailer ramp and went peacefully to her new home in Sherborn. I went to see Emily a couple days later. The wild one was busy chewing her way through her daily, 40-ppound allotment of feed and hay. She paused long enough to let me rub her neck and to let me know exactly what spot on her enormous head she wanted scratched, thank you. She seemed alert and content in her toasty stall. And the round, waxy, meat inspector’s sticker was starting to wear off her hindquarters. That’s how close this interesting animal came to living and dying in anonymity. Pass the tofu, please.

MIDDLESEX NEWS FRIDAY, DECEMBER 29, 1995 EMILY’S LESSON IN VEGETARIANISM By Christof Heinrich One day she was scheduled to land on your skillet, the next she’d hoofed her way straight into your heart. Unless you subscribe to the Middlesex News primarily for use as a daily supply of cat litter box liner, you probably know who I’m talking about: Emily the Cow. That exclusive, warm-nosed, dare I say, intelligent (a term jealously guarded and reserved for a few select creatures who we do not eat like dogs and cats), bovine who, six weeks ago sensed her imminent grisly fate, and cleared a five-foot metal gate at the Arena Slaughterhouse in Hopkinton. With a leap that literally defied death, Emily cleared a very real physical barrier. She also crossed an invisible and arbitrary psychological wall, becoming, instead of one of several billion faceless animals annual marched to their death in slaughterhouses across the nation, an individual. One animal with - thanks to one of Frank Arena’s young nieces- a name. A living being with a brain, a heart, intelligence, capable of feeling pain, and quite obviously fear. One the same day slaughterhouse owner Frank Arena handed Emily’s $1 bill of sale over to Sherborn residents Meg and Lewis Randa, I suspect many of her fellow dairy cows met a decidedly different fate behind the building’s closed doors. This beloved bovine’s break for freedom was one-in-a-million. But the purpose of this column is not to criticize Frank Arena or slaughterhouse owners. They, like the rest of us, are just trying to earn a living. And, though the knife might be in their hands, it really lies in ours. I am, as you might have guessed, a vegetarian. I took a gradual path to vegetarianism (In fact, because I still do occasionally dabble in sea-food, I must admit I’m not quite there.) About four years ago, out of concern for my health and our environment, I stopped eating beef, the most energy intensive of all meats.