Thursday, January 14, 2021

How do you hide a cow?


I took Mrs ERJ to a doctor's visit. I expected it to be a while. I came prepared. I brought a large book to read.

I cracked The Book open to Isaiah and started reading. For those who are not familiar with what Christians call the Old Testament, the various "books" cover the same history from several different perspectives. Isaiah is a prophet who foretells of an imminent invasion and the vast majority of the working-aged men being carted off by the invaders. Basically, the country being laid to waste and all assets stripped.

A recurring theme in the early part of Isaiah is of a "remnant". In Chapter 6:11-13 God defines the size of the remnant as significantly less than 10% since waves of depopulation will spasm through the land as long as a tenth (or more) remains.

Until cities lie waste
without inhabitant,
and houses without people,
and the land is a desolate waste,
and the Lord removes people far away,
and the forsaken places are many in the midst of the land.
And though a tenth remain in it,
it will be burned again..."   -ESV translation

Grim stuff. Cities laid to waste. Countryside depopulated and desolate.

Sifting through the text, there are rays of hope. The remnant will live on curds and honey. The footnotes in the Bible I was reading said that Isaiah was foretelling that it would not be safe to work the fields and that the population that survived would get substantial amounts of calories from wild bees and the milk of semi-feral cows, goats and sheep.

Holodomor was a man-made tragedy. Marxists took issue with conservative peasants' ideas regarding private property

That caught my attention because I read some accounts of Holodomor survivors. One of the accounts told of a farm family who was somehow able to hide their milch cow. The milk/cream from that one cow provided enough extra calories to keep several families alive.

How do you hide a cow!

Step One: Pick a cow that is smaller than typical and has little-or-no white above the body mid-line. People selected for white so they were easy to find when they wandered off. They also favored bold patterns-on-white so individual animals were easy to identify and sort when grazing the commons. Milking your neighbor's cow was a big no-no.

Step Two: Eliminate the evidence you have a cow. The first place the invaders will look are in the barn. Remove all traces of fresh cow-poop and cow feed. Many people have barns that used to hold livestock and old poop remains. Old poop is not a problem.

Step Three: Train the cow to eat at night. A pellet gun can be your friend. It is difficult to miss a cow grazing in a pasture during the day.

Step Four: Train the cow to only come to the voice of one or two selected people. They will give it a tiny reward of grain or high quality hay and milk the cow. Train the cow to wait in a secluded spot for the milker and not run to him/her.

Step Five: Don't be super-tidy on your farm. Have a few brushy areas near the tops of hills. Grazing animals love hill-tops where it is breezy (fewer insects), good visibility so they can watch for predators (they still have that wiring) and a bit of shade. Keep the hill-tops near the farmhouse shaved short to show you aren't hiding anything.

Step Six: Share some of the milk and veal with your closest, trustworthy neighbors. There is no way you can hide your bonanza from them. Cows make noise. Additionally, at some point you are going to need a bull to rebreed the cow. They can help locate one. What if you have a neighbor who is not trustworthy? It is not a tough choice. Either they die or your kids die.

Goats come in an astounding variety of colors and patterns. Some disappear the instant they step into the brush or tree-line. These are Nubian goats.

 

Notes: Goats are smarter and easier to train than cows. They are also smaller and harder to catch/shoot.

At this point you might be thinking "I will never use this information" but consider the challenge of hiding a couple of full "pigs" of LP. Is that problem significantly different? Or how about hiding three full cords of firewood or any other productive asset that might be of interest to invaders?


13 comments:

  1. Interesting thoughts.
    Remember, you don't have to reinvent the wheel - this has been done before by people more desperate than you are. Research is your friend... Just make sure you don't do exactly the same thing; some variation will help throw off any searchers who have read the same source material.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I would be interested whether preemptively taking action in Step 6 would violate the Sixth Commandment.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I believe preemptively taking the action in Step 6 would be a violation of the Sixth Commandment unless it were "within the law".

      While NOT a Biblical scholar, it may be three, sober, adult men dispassionately determining that the overwhelming evidence is that the problematic family are agents/spies for the enemy and lawfully subject to the penalties meted out to enemy combatants.

      Delete
    2. For me, the Commandments are more of a guideline/policy white paper than hard and fast rules. If you can't survive, you can't follow the guidelines. Survival is the only hard and fast rule with one subsection that I adhere to, and that is it is better to die on your feet than live on your knees. There may be a subsection that says it's okay to not survive if it enhances the survival of your family/clan/tribe.

      Commandments are good general social rules, but consider me an indifferent agnostic. I can respect the religiously inclined, but do not feel bound by their rules.

      Delete
  3. Off on a tangent(I'm sure you're surprised)I had run into having to reinstall firefox on my tablet which nuked bookmarks. In searching for a news site that has two b's in it duck duck go told me that site is for sale. After some some dancing I found it(not for sale). Also, with the events with parler, I thought it might be worthwhile to at least have a way to access it even if I had never used it before. I used a search engine found the company's web site and downloaded and installed the app on my droid phone. Seeing as I had a lot of app updates on tap today, I decided to look at the app on my phone. I was a tad surprised that that particular app didn't seem to be anywhere to be found on my phone. No soup for you.... Did they yank the app off my phone? I can only speculate( I did NOT install it from the app store).

    ReplyDelete
  4. Great stuff. If people aren't looking for ways to use this information... More for the rest of us I guess

    ReplyDelete
  5. Great stuff. If people aren't looking for ways to use this information... More for the rest of us I guess

    ReplyDelete
  6. Well considering the part of the green new deal is to remove all cattle from the world because they belch methane which is a green house gas we may have to hide some. Ultimately if the green new deal were to be fully implemented most Americans would be left starving and either freezing in the dark or dying of sunstroke in hot places. Many of the elite want to reduce population!

    ReplyDelete
  7. More good thoughts.

    Interesting about Isiah and the tenth. It's said that in the event of a long-term "social dislocation" 90%+ of the population may die. Funny....

    ReplyDelete
  8. We have one brown short horn/jersey who has the most silent Mooo ever and one brown swiss Guernsey that bellows like a train. Both are halter broke, so if anything id hike them back into the woods wire off a section and feed them grain and hay bails.

    I dont think you will break a cow from running to the sound of sloshing feed in a bucket. The dont care if its you or the gestapo.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Every once in a while (definitely not frequently enough), I read an article that isn't a worn-out rehash of something already posted hundreds of times on the internet, and which offers useful information. Thank you.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank-you for reading and thank-you for your kind words.

      Delete

Readers who are willing to comment make this a better blog. Civil dialog is a valuable thing.