Attribution: Harris & Ewing, photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Common
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, reports the keeper offering to teach the ICE agents how to milk cows, a skill that heretofore had been performed by those who were more recent immigrants than all the rest of us and who needed to lay low or be shipped to Oz without their kids.
Former Trump-voting cow owners are complaining that they must now get up in the middle of the night to milk their own cows and they do not like it, nor can they hire anyone to help them as milking cows is not deemed an acceptable job in this high-tech age.
Milking cows as it is now done—by machine in big impersonal circles, is much different than in the keeper’s very early experience. Back then you grabbed a bucket and a milk stool and positioned yourself next to the cow so your head nestled into her flank and her udder was handy to your hands with their special teat flexing motions.
To suggest that it was anything but a routine farm task overlooks the verity that it was a farm boy’s option as to whether or not he wanted to talk to the cow as he was so physically involved with her. It is the keeper’s shaky memory that he was a mumbling cow-milker who shared things with some of the cows that he could not talk over with Mom.
Note to in-training ICE cow milkers: “There will come a time when the cow you are milking will swat you across the face with a tail that has been soaking in a manure-filled gutter. The experience is akin to a cow’s “executive order” so do not take it personally. And if she steps on your toes, that too is part of the cow-milking game. We would wish you all good luck but frankly we would rather talk to the cows!”
