Lucy

            In the world of bovines, very few would win a beauty contest. Lucy, however, was one of those exceptional cows that was actually beautiful. She was a registered Black Angus and weighed about 1250 pounds. She was halter broken to lead and had been shown as a calf, and again as a yearling at the fair, winning blue ribbons whenever she was shown. There was not even a hair naturally out of place on that cow. She was also one of the smartest cows I have ever been around. It can be difficult to describe how stupid a cow can be, but trust me, they are notoriously dumb. (Pigs on the other hand, are brilliant by comparison.) Well, Lucy was big, beautiful, and smart.

            We were getting the cows in to vaccinate them for various diseases, and apply “pour on” for lice, something we did once a year in the spring. We would gather the cows and calves from the pastures and progress them into smaller and smaller corrals. The calves were separated so they were out of the way.

            Working corrals have an “alley” that can vary greatly in length, but usually somewhere between 20 and 40 feet long, and about the width of the average cow. At one end of this alley, or chute, would be what is known as a “crowd pen” where a bunch of cows would be herded and “crowded” together. If could hold anywhere from twenty or so to about forty head of cattle, depending on the size of the pen and the average size of the cows.

            At the other end of the alley was either a “squeeze chute” or a simple “head catcher”. When the cows were forced down the alley from the crowd pen the lead cow would be caught by the neck at the other end. Some head catchers were automatic and did not need a human operator, but the squeeze chutes needed someone to close the head catching part.

            The first cow coming down the alley was caught, and the cows behind her were pushed head to tail, crowded together, to keep it full. A 2×4 or something similar was placed behind the last cow and slipped between the side rails so the cattle could not back out.

            With the alley full of cows standing head to tail, one of the “hands” would walk down the length of the alley and vaccinate every cow where she stood in line. The pour on went the same way; one cow after another in the line. After every cow in the alley and squeeze had been treated, the lead cow was released and all the cattle that had been held in the alley were released. The alley was then refilled and the process repeated until all the cows had been vaccinated.

            This year Lucy was about five years old and had been down the alley a few times in her past. And she didn’t like it. Not one bit. The last couple of years she had been the last cow down the alley and it always took some doing to get her in there. This year we thought we were prepared and did things a little differently.

            Usually it didn’t matter what cow came first or last. We just took what came. But knowing how hard it had been to get Lucy down that alley the year before, this year we planned to be very sure she was in the first or at the very least the second bunch into the crowd pen. The sheer numbers and pressures from the other cows should force her down the alley at some point and the hard part would be done.

            We managed to sort Lucy into the very first group of cattle we herded into the crowd pen. We thought we had it made, and with any other cow that would have been the case. But this was Lucy, not any other cow. And she was not going down that alley-not today and not any other day of her life. She had apparently made this decision and she was sticking to it.

            We tried absolutely everything we could think of to force her down that alley. We crowded her with other cows, we yelled, we twisted her tail when she got close, but she was not going down that alley. Group after group of cattle were herded down, treated, and released, but Lucy remained in the crowd pen.

            By now the owner was getting pretty “hot”. That cow was going down the alley if he had anything at all to say about it, and Lucy felt just the opposite. I climbed outside of the whole setup to just get out of the way. The battle was on, and it was going to be a big one, I could tell.

            I won’t go into detail here about everything that happened to poor Lucy. I will just say I begged the owner to stop, but there was no reasoning with him. He went after her with a 2×4 and it wasn’t long before her entire face was a bloody, beaten pulp with shredded tissue, dripping blood. Why he hadn’t blinded her in his rage I’ll never know. The owner and Lucy were both trembling and heaving at the end, separated by a few feet and glaring at each other. To her credit, Lucy never attacked the man, but to this day I don’t know why she didn’t. She took everything he dished out to her. I am pretty sure the only reason Lucy didn’t die that day is because she was worth around $1000.

            But she never did go down that alley. In fact she never went down the alley for the rest of her entire life.

            I still remember very vividly how she looked at the end of that day. This was a cow, and I believe that, for whatever reason, she had decided she would die if she went with the other cows. That’s the only thing I can think of.

            Lucy had a belief. Logical or not, shared by other cows or not, she had that belief. And in the end, here was a cow that was ready to literally die for what she believed.

            I have to ask myself, am I as dedicated to my beliefs as Lucy was to hers? If I am ever faced with renouncing Christ or facing torture or my death, would I have the strength and commitment to hold fast to what I believe is the truth? Would I have the guts that Lucy, a cow, had? It’s not like Lucy was holding out for an afterlife in cow heaven. For her, if she died for what she believed, it was the end. There was nothing else ahead for her. I would like to say that I would stand until the end for what I believe as a Christian, but I honestly don’t know. I hope I never have to find out.

            But sometimes when I think about Lucy, it makes me stop and think. Do I have as much strength in my beliefs as that cow did in hers?