THE RUC shot a runaway cow in the streets of Ballymena recently. They didn't feel they had a choice, having received no training whatsoever in the control of country animals which get lost in a town. The brute was causing havoc, thundering in and out of shops, and causing people's hearts to lurch sideways.
A cow on the run through mean streets is not at all the same attractive beast as a cow calmly grazing buttercups in a field. A cow on the run is several tons of beef cominatcha. So the cop drew his revolver and shot it dead. That was the first time in the recorded history of Northern Ireland that both communities applauded as one the fatal use of guns by the RUC.
The cop shoulda pulled the cow's tail. Anyone who's ever come within an ass's roar of a cow knows that that's how you handle the beast. All Hot Press readers should know it. As we have seen in Ballymena, you can never tell the hour or the day when a cow might go shopping in the locality.
The beasts are everywhere. A couple of weeks after the Ballymena incident, and several hundred miles away, in the deep south of Ireland, I was minding my own business at eleven o'clock at night when the front door burst open and a woman stood silhouetted against the darkening sky.
*Come quick,* she said. *The calf has a knot in its gut.* It being far from a calf's guts that I was reared, I expressed some mild amaze. The woman, however, was insistent. Her son, the rock and roll farmer who's the best drummer in the county, had gone off to play a gig, and she would have accepted help from an unarmed Black and Tan so desperate was she to save the calf.
So out to the street I went (the street, in the county, is the stretch outside your front door) and over the road (which is any stretch of ground along which a vehicle may pass) and into the woman's barnyard (the ground in front of the barn). Sure enough, there on the ground was a wee calf, lying on its back, its hooves waving piteously in the air.
As we stood looking, it got to its feet and turned in circles, as though it had the head staggers. Then it tried to scratch its belly with its back hoof. That was one of the saddest things I've ever seen. A calf's back hoof is as useless as an elephant's back foot in the underbelly scratching department.
Exhausted, the little beastie fell to the ground. Not a sound issued from its lips. The knot in the guts would, if not straightened out, kill it. This made me think of Elvis in his final hours, slumping off the toilet onto the bathroom floor and dying there. He had colitis, you know, which is, roughly speaking, and if you stretch the point - a lot - a bit like what the calf had.
The woman asked me to hold the crittur steady while she dosed it with a mixture of water, salt and baking soda, which she proposed to pour straight down its throat using a baby-feed bottle. Calling up every pictorial memory I had of how John Wayne did these things, I grabbed the cow's neck from behind while simultaneously straddling it.
It's no bother at all to a dying baby cow to throw a city slicker off its back. As we both lay in the shit, the woman dosed her beast. Then she showed me how to massage its wee tummy. Rub a dub, rub a dub, we went, hoping to release the wind which had the calf's gut in knots. The little brute refused to fart. Three doses of medicine later, it staggered up to the top of a manure heap and lay down to meet death.
Nobody ever drowned in a manure heap said the woman, as she pushed me up it. Nobody ever sank further than their ankles she called up to me as I demanded she ring the air-sea helicopter search and rescue mission. It was at that moment that the spreadeagled calf which I was now clinging to for dear life, it being a raft on a sea of shit, chose to belch and fart simultaneously.
Great stuff, the woman called, for she had heard and smelt all. *Now catch it by the tail and drive it down to me.* Those were her instructions. That is what I did. You take hold of the tail at its extreme end, raise it and the calf will stand up. You pull back and the calf stops. Flick the tail and the calf moves. Push the tail and it runs forward. Honestly. I drove the calf down the manure heap, across the barnyard, and round and round the field until there wasn't the makings of the smallest fart in the world in its belly.
I just thought you should know what to do, now that cows have started leaving farms to check out city life. The guards do not carry revolvers. Many of them have forgotten how to handle animals. It might all come down to you, someday.