Cleo the Cow (A True Story)

Revised 1.7.2019

My Dad named his cows after his relatives. There was Doyle, named after his Dad, and Josephine, named after his Mom, and so on.

It was kind of weird when we would be eating a steak or hamburger and Dad would say, “this is Uncle Bob!” We would kind of cringe and say, “OK, Dad”. 

But later, after we got used to his joking, we would roll with it, and say things like,

“Josephine is so much more tender than Doyle” and “Addie is tougher to chew than Meryl” 

Dad’s cows were able to roam freely, eating grass in several big fields, so the meat from them was very tender and delicious. But one cow never did end up on the dinner table. Her name was Cleo, who was named after my Dad’s aunt. 

We picked up baby Cleo from another farm, and drove her back to our farm. My Dad drove our old 1974 Chevy truck, as my stepmom Deb and I held the baby cow in the bed of the truck.

Little Cleo soon grew up to be a very big Cleo. Dad would whistle from the barn, after he would fill the trough with grain, and Cleo and the other cows would come running. They loved supper time! 

Dad really enjoyed taking care of his cows. 

When Cleo grew old enough to become a mother, we walked her over to our neighbor’s farm, so she could become pregnant from his bull. 

A few months later, she gave give birth to a calf.

Over the years, she gave birth to many babies. She was a good mother. Dad would often say that she was a gentle giant. Cleo became his favorite cow.

Even when she grew too old to have babies, she still enjoyed taking care of other young calves that were on our farm. Often the calves would suck on the skin that hung from her neck, and she never complained. 

Cleo outlived all of Dad’s cows, just as his aunt Cleo outlived all of her relatives. Except Aunt Cleo was very skinny and small, and Cleo the cow was very fat and HUGE. I think Dad loved Cleo the Cow just as much as he loved his aunt Cleo. She was a 1500 pound pet!

One day Dad and Deb came home to find Cleo in the middle of the barnyard on her back, with her feet straight up in the air. Dad’s heart sank. He thought she was dead, but when he walked up close to her, he could see that she was breathing. They tried to turn her over onto her side, so that she could get up. But she wouldn’t budge. So they called the vet.

They tied ropes and pulleys to her legs, and got her to roll over on her stomach, and she ran off as if nothing was wrong. 

The vet told them if she had stayed on her back much longer, that she would have died. 

He said that if it happened again when they were not home, that Cleo could die in 30-60 minutes. You see, a cow has 4 stomachs.

If a cow is upside down for too long, she can regurgitate her cud from her rumen, and it can go into her lungs, and make her die. Or, she could get badly bloated, and die from that.

Anyway, that was the first time that Dad ever had any problem with Cleo.

Then one day Cleo wouldn’t come into the barn to eat. Dad walked to her, and she just stood there in the field and looked at him. She did not appear to be injured, but she did not want to move. 

So for the next few days Dad hauled food and water out to her. This took a lot of time and energy, so Dad decided to try to get her to come back in the barn. 

He took his pitchfork and poked her a few times, and got her to walk over to the barn. She ate in there for a few days, but then she wouldn’t move from the barn.

So Dad called the vet. Dad thought maybe she had injured herself by stepping in a ground hog hole. Dad was always trying to keep ground hogs out of the fields. 

Or, maybe she had broken a bone or strained something from carrying around all of that weight. Dad thought that maybe her hip was bothering her, but when the vet came out, he couldn’t find anything wrong with her. 

Cleo did finally walk out of the barn, but then, unfortunately, she lay down, and died, right at the top of a very steep hill south of the barn. Dad could hardly believe it. His favorite cow. 

At that time, Cleo had been taking care of one calf. It walked up to Cleo, and gave a little moo. Dad was amazed at how the calf seemed to show little sympathy or sadness, when she saw Cleo, dead on the ground. After that moo, that was it. The calf didn’t pay any more attention to her at all. 

But Dad was very sad.

He didn’t have time to mourn too much, however, because now he had to figure out what to do with a big dead cow in his barnyard. Because Dad was just a part-time farmer, he didn’t have a tractor or backhoe to move her. He did have several shovels, but the ground was still pretty frozen. It would have been awfully hard to dig a huge hole to bury her. 

He heard there was a guy who would come pick up your cow within 24 hours after it died, and skin the cow for the hide. But because Dad was very busy as director of Mohican Outdoor School, he could not coordinate his schedule with that guy, and that 24 hour period passed.

So, he still had a dead cow, with a hide on it. You can’t butcher a cow when they die on the hoof like Cleo did. And she was probably way too old to butcher, anyway. 

Then he heard about another guy who would come pick up a cow within 48 hours. Dad told him to bring a small truck to pick her up, because the gate into the barnyard was narrow. But when he arrived with his crew, they had a huge truck, way too big to drive through the gate. So they didn’t want to deal with the situation, and left.

Dad stood next to Cleo and wondered what to do. He didn’t want her decaying in the middle of the barnyard. He took hold of her legs, and pushed and pulled and tugged, but he could barely get her to budge. So he gave up, for that day.

A couple days later, his three sons, Tim (that’s me telling this story), Dan, and Andy, came to visit Dad and Deb for Thanksgiving. We decided to make moving Cleo our Thanksgiving project. 

After a nice Thanksgiving meal, the five of us went out to the barnyard. It was still pretty cold, but it had gotten a little warmer since Cleo died. So the barnyard was a snowy, muddy mess. We talked for awhile about what to do, and finally we decided to tie ropes around Cleo’s legs, and pull her down the hill into the woods. 

After quite a bit of all of us pulling and pushing, we finally got her rear end up on this hump at the top of the hill. But when we got her head up on the hump, her rear end fell back down. And when we got her head up on the hump, when we tried to get her rear end up, her head would come back down. We could not get her whole body on top of that hump!

So after some more talking, we decided maybe we would have better luck if we turned her around. So after more tugging and grunting, we got her front legs up on the hump. But when we tried to get her back legs up, her front legs fell back down. We could not get her massive body all the way up on top of that hump. This went on for it seemed a couple hours. We were all very frustrated and worn out from moving a 1500 pound dead cow.

Then my little brother Andy got this bright idea. He said he would try to pry her from underneath with a spud bar, to lift her over the hump. We all took a look at little Andy and said, sorry, Andy, we don’t think that will work. 

So we headed down the hill to clear brush and cut trees, so that if we ever did get her over the hump, we’d have an easier time rolling her down the hill as far as possible.

But Andy stayed behind, and he took the spud bar and started prying on her body, and wouldn’t you know, one little guy with a big pole could do more than all 5 of us. He lifted her right up on the hump, and with another push down on the spud bar, she started rolling, all 1,500 pounds of her, down the hill, tha-thump, tha-thump, tha-thump, her legs flailing high in the air with each rotation, coming right toward us! We screamed and scattered out of the way. Cleo tore down the field, crashed through a fence, and finally came to rest against a small tree. All of our mouths were wide open in shock. 

Dad was horrified that Cleo’s body had turned into a huge bowling ball, crashing into the woods, but he breathed a sigh of relief, that at least she was out of the barnyard.

We put an electric fence around the carcass. Dad wanted to keep their dogs and wild animals from disturbing her body, so she could decay in peace. Also, Dad had quite a skull and bone collection that he had found on his 40 acres over the years, and he thought it would be fun to have some big bones and the skull from Cleo.

Much later, he found out that he was breaking the law by not burying or disposing of her body. It’s illegal to just leave a dead body to decay on your property. But we didn’t realize that at the time, so we weren’t worried about it. 

So Cleo lay down there in the woods, mostly frozen, for the rest of the winter. Occasionally she would thaw a bit when the weather warmed up a bit, but then she would re-freeze. When spring arrived, her body began to decay more rapidly, and with that came a sickeningly sweet odor that would waft up to the house, especially when the wind was blowing just right. 

Her body swelled up like a balloon. Dad took a pitchfork and poked her a few times, breaking the balloon. After this it seemed she started to melt into the ground.

The electric fence pretty much kept the bigger animals out, but the smaller ones, like mice, moles, squirrels, and chipmunks did get in, often at night, and had a bite. We knew this because you could see little animal trails that came from the woods, underneath the electric fence, and up to her orifices. 

Turkey vultures and crows came and helped out, too.

Eventually her bones began to stick out, and finally, after about two years, she was just a pile of bones. Dad collected the bones that had not been drug away by the animals, and added them to his bone collection. He put Cleo’s huge skull on the roof of the old chicken coop, and it stayed there for many years.

Dad loved to tell the story of Cleo at parties. People would go from being spellbound, to totally grossed out, to laughing their heads off, as the story unfolded.