Dear Readers,
I have asked The Gardener to skip one so I can
try this Postcard thing. My name is Stump Valley SS Cookie ET ("Cookie"
for short), and I am a Holstein heifer. In layman's terms I
am a female cow with black and white spots. About 90 of the dairy cows in the
United States are Holsteins, but if you can't remember what we look like, just grab
a Ben and Jerry's container. That's
us.
I know what you are thinking: It's been several
months since the last Postcard. What have you been doing? Cut me some slack
here. Do you have any idea how hard it is to type with split hooves? And don't
even get me started on touch screens.
Anyway, I met D 1 and The Gardener at the
Delaware Valley College Cattle Auction this past March. It was a cold, miserable, rainy
weekend, but the cows had a nice warm barn. I
made the trip from Stump Valley Farms (from which I take my full name) and took
my place in between two other yearlings.
After a while, people
started walking through - mostly men. If I could read at the time, I would have
noticed that a lot of them were wearing John Deere hats. I was tied up facing toward
the wall, so most people that looked at me were staring at... well, let's
dispense with the subtleties, they were examining my rear end. I know what
you are thinking: "It's such a meat market."
But you are mistaken. The meat market is the local Hooters restaurant. This
is a dairy market, thank you very much. And incidentally, we don't go to
Hooters. We go to Udders. If you have never seen cows on roller skates serving
beer, it's quite a sight.
Anyway, back to the pre-auction. While standing there
ruminating (chewing my cud), I started to hear comments like, "Looks like
she will calve well.", or "The hooks and the pins seem about the
right height." Do you mind?! Of course it was hard to
tell which comments were directed at me and which were directed at my fellow
heifers either side of me, but either way it's bit objectifying, don't
you think?
Eventually this man and his teenage daughter
came over to look at me. They were different. For
one thing, the girl was telling her dad what she thought
of me, rather than the reverse. Eventually I figured
it out. The man had no idea what he was doing, and the girl was the brains of
the operation. She would talk, and he would write stuff down. A lot of times he
would ask, "What does that mean?" But I figured
he was there serving some purpose, and I kind of liked the girl. So I tried to put my best hoof forward and impress
them both.
The next morning they began parading us into a
ring in the next barn. All the people were sitting in chairs and bleachers.
There was a guy talking really fast. I couldn't quite understand what he was saying
at first. He was calling out numbers and people were raising
these white cards. Sometimes the people got really excited. Eventually someone else
would smack a hammer on a table, a person would stand up looking very happy, and
walk away with whomever was in the ring.
When it was my turn, the
girl from the previous night was staring at me. The
fast-talking guy started doing his thing. Eventually, the
girl raised her card. Then someone else did. Then she raised her card again. Back and forth
a bunch of times, until finally the hammer sounded and she jumped up with her
father. They led me to a table where he pulled out a whole
lot of pieces of green paper and handed it to a man. Now I know what her father
was there for: He was the keeper of the green paper. Then
they led me back to the barn.
The girl introduced herself as "D1"
(an odd name, I think). She kept hugging my head - not sure what that means, but she seemed to like doing it. The
man said he was "The Gardener", which I thought was a particularly strange name
for a farmer. I guess when a farmer gets a bunch of green paper he becomes a gardener.
Finally they put
me in a trailer, and we drove to a farm I had never seen before. This was my
new home.
At the new farm I met a huge 2 year old cow
named Eclipse. She also belongs to D1. She was pregnant, and seemed a lot happier about it than I expected. I wondered
about that. It turns out that while most Holsteins get
pregnant from something called a "veterinary procedure", Eclipse
had an unscheduled romp in the pasture with a Hereford Bull named Nelson. Herefords are beef cows, so I think Eclipse may be expecting a
cheeseburger.
D1 and I have become friends. And I have
learned that she is part of a herd as well. There is a D2, a D3 and a D4. I think their
farmer (The Gardener) needs to come up with more original names - just saying…
In early summer, Dl
picked out a bull for me - his name is "Canyon Breeze AT Airlift". I
had the "procedure" - suffice to say that
Eclipse had way more fun making the cheeseburger. But the procedure appears to
have been successful and I'm hoping for a baby girl next spring.
* * *
The
Gardener will return for the next Postcard. In the meantime, remember
the Holstein motto from my bovine sisters who work in advertising at that fast
food place: EAT MOR CHIKIN! 
