Walter Gienapp: My Cow Caper On The Canal

  • Monday, July 8, 2013
  • Walter Gienapp
photo by Bonnie McGhee Photography

“A harebrained escapade” is one of the definitions of a “caper”. The word “caper” is also Latin for “he-goat”. The story of the “he-goat” will have to wait.  It will be “The Caper Caper”.

“What is that thing over in that man’s yard?” The children would ask as the family car slowed down for a closer look.  “It looks like a cow that has outgrown her own little house.  Her head is sticking through the wall and all the rest of her, except her neck, is sticking out the other side.  She just carries this little shed around with her as she munches on the grass.”  Then the parent tries to explain. “Maybe that is a government thing where the EPA wants to monitor the amount of personal gas being thrown into the atmosphere by the cows of America.  We live in a great country, you know.  I heard there might be a new tax to cover that.  If that’s the case, this guy has it on the wrong end of the cow.”

Little did they know that they were looking at a new invention in the dairy business that would some day make me rich.  It was called an “anti-self-milking collar”.

We had bought a small house in the shadow of the C&D canal on the outskirts of the small Maryland town of Chesapeake City.  About that time, the Waugh family gave me my first cow. 

I was born and raised on a farm in Iowa so I knew plenty about cows.  I had this love-hate attitude toward cows.  I loved the products but not milking by hand twice a day, 365 days a year. In ten years you have milked 36,300 cows.  If you are born on a subsistence farm in a subsistence family, (of 10 children), at age five, you head to the barn, grab a bucket and start milking.  You never look back.  You don’t want to see that anyway.  How can something so beautiful as a bucket of fresh milk be so closely related to something so vile as the back end of a cow?

You keep milking, hating it most of the time, because there are so many more fun things to do, like cleaning the manure out of the gutter and lugging it 50 feet to the back door one fork full at a time. When you reach the age of 18 and the courage of 40, you tell your dad that you are going off on your own.  You won’t be milking his cows anymore.  And, “Oh yes, Dad, may I have a couple of cows?”

The young cow had never calved but was perfectly capable.  I gladly moved her onto my one acre in Chesapeake City.  I knew when to call the man for artificial insemination. The female, even though penned alone begins to bellow and mill around and call to the neighbors to see if there is an aspiring male in the vicinity. When you look more closely at her you can see this pathetic “unrequited love” look in her eyes.  You get on the phone for help.  

Nine months later a bull calf is born.  It had to be on a day when my eldest was home alone. Now, of all my children, he is the one who would least like to be home on such an occasion.  He called me, wondering what to do when the 30-second old calf lay motionless on the ground.  The neighbor was trying to give advice.  Of course, experience told me that all would be well and it was.

Things went along just fine.  I had my own cooker to pasteurize the milk and another one to separate the cream from the skim milk.  I couldn’t use all of if.  I tried to sell it, then I gave it away and we all got fatter and fatter on homemade butter, whole milk and homemade ice cream.

My brothers and I always dreamed of teaching the cows to milk themselves so that we wouldn’t have to go to the barn and do it.  Believe it or not, some cows can do this.  They can learn this trick lying down.  Problem is they consume their own milk and you are out. 

She was now headed down the wrong path. You can buy a device to put in their nose that will flap over their mouth to prevent this trick.  She was smarter than the average cow and learned how to flip it up and get the job done anyway.  What could I do to prevent here from getting her head turned around so far as to do this trick?

First, there was a simple 4x4 collar. That should fix her. It didn’t. Well!  What if I nailed a row of 16 penny nails, point into the wood of course, so that the heads would press her skin and just be uncomfortable.  The nails would not puncture her skin.  The nails didn’t hurt her at all.  She still “nursed” herself.  What if I put in two more rows of nails and left only that part of the 2x4 that was actually against her skin smooth. Surely she wouldn’t want to push around all three rows of nails to get to her own milk, but she did.  What more could I add?  I needed to make the collar so wide that she could not turn her head back around to her other end.  She would have to be able to drink and graze freely.

I now would construct another 4x4 collar and attach it to the first collar by a spread of plywood about 14 inches wide all around.  It worked.  She could graze and drink just fine and she had to leave her milk for her blessed owner.

Now the traffic passing by our house began to be a problem.  Cars would stop.  People would jump out and take pictures and point to the thing in my yard and try to explain stuff to their children.  I took my name off the mail box.  It appeared to be a fact that someone had penned this cow up in the barn and she had broken out, taking part of the barn wall with her. The cow was fine. I was fine, but totally embarrassed. How could I explain to my neighbors that I now had an invention that would make me rich?  All I needed was to market this “hall-closet collar” to all the normal farmers out there that had dysfunctional cows.

My virtue became my vice. I won the battle, but lost the war. I saved the milk, but lost the cow. The cow wasn’t so embarrassed as far as I could tell. I was a different case. The invention wasn’t my problem, but the cow that made it necessary.

Being busy enough with three goats, 200 rabbits, 50 ferrets, one hog, 30 chickens, one beagle, one cat and six children, my little one-acre patch was over loaded and something had to go and soon.  In strictly biblical terms we “prepared the fatted calf”. What did you expect? I couldn’t get rid of the kids for several years.

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(Walter Gienapp is the pastor at Mountain View Presbyterian Church, and lives with his wife, Carole, in Lookout Valley. Five of his eight children live in the Chattanooga area with their families.)

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