The Cows of Madison

I was fortunate to grow up on a small farm in Southeast Texas. When I was a kid we had a little Jersey cow that produced three or four gallons of milk every day. I will never forget how good the fresh raw sweetmilk and buttermilk tasted and how I used to enjoy churning butter. It was the most wonderful butter I have ever tasted! Jersey milk is extremely high in butter fat. In those days before we were saddled with the food police who tell us that everything that tastes like food will kill us, we didn't know that all those high-fat dairy products would kill us. If I had known that, I am sure I would have had a heart attack and died fifty years ago.


The point of this is that I am at heart a Texas farmboy who loves everything concerning animals of the bovine persuasion (I wanted to say that I love cows, but my readers would have probably misinterpreted that phrasing, although I am not an Aggie). Madison, Wisconsin, is a paradise for those who revel in bovine lore. The sidewalks downtown are decorated with many brightly painted, life-size statues of cows. The cows have names such as Frank Loin Wright, Blue Moooon over Kentucky, and Global Traveler. Below each statue a plaque is inscribed with various bits of trivia informing the reader how many glasses of milk (33,000) is produced every year by each dairy cow in Wisconsin, the yearly value in billions of dollars of the state's dairy industry, etc.

Did you know that each cow in the Badger State urinates 1555 times a year? All those millions of cows constantly searching for flat rocks!

PS - Did you know that a Texas steer named Bevo is the mascot of the team that won the college football championship in 2005?