Two steers taking part the opening Western Rodeo Parade and Cattle drive wandered off course when they saw a break in the crowds lining the parade route and detoured into a local Food Mart convenience store.
A brave pair of cowboys entered the store on horseback to retrieve the cattle as this security video from the AP shows:
Watch the event unfold with aerial footage of the sedate stampede on the KING5 News website. Witnesses reported that the cattle were impeccably behaved and declined to act like bulls in a china shop…
Last year I suggested there was room in the self-help book market for a new title, A Dummies Guide to Dude Ranching. There are obviously quiet a few people out there who’d buy a copy given visitor traffic to the story 12 months on.
With that in mind, how about a companion title on How To Be A Cowboy? There must be many folks who would love a couple of hundred pages, in addition to their classic westerns DVD collection, on how to live the cowboy lifestyle.
If books aren’t your thing then how about a trip to the Arizona Cowboy College? It’s “Your chance to learn authentic cowboy skills at a working cattle ranch.”
I passed through Scottsdale at the start of 2009 and wish I’d had the chance to stop by for a week’s tuition. Just look at the kind of training on offer below - not sure I’d be able to pick up all this lot in one of those trademarked yellow manuals!
Two good wild west related stories on the Beeb site this week worth reporting. First off is the matter of the theft of Geronimo’s skull.
This is a case that at first glance would seem to be nothing more than a hoax but due to the involvement of a secret society, the story has grown wings over the last century.
The second story is concerned with the race to develop alternative fuels, in this case turning manure into ethanol.
“Over the last 20, 30 years, there’ve been lots of people with new ideas - pie in the sky ideas - about how we were going to use manure but, at the end of the day, the best thing we use it for is fertiliser.”
Let’s hope Hereford - ‘Beef Capital of the World’ - does one day get to be the renewable energy capital of Texas.
The CCTV footage shows a brave meat counter man (with food hygiene hat) who plays matador with a supermarket trolley. Get that man a medal now!
Good on John Cummins, owner of the store, to see the funny side and make a joke about ‘fresh meat’. He should get the bull stuffed and mounted outside the front of the shop for posterity.
A love of cheesburgers therefore not only killed Elvis in his prime, but is highly likely to cause climate chaos in the years ahead. Or maybe not.
Today, scientists have published the cow genome. After 6 years of work by more than 300 researchers, and $53 million in funding, the genetic map of the cow species is now known.
The researchers believe the findings will help improve the quality and safety of beef and dairy products and can be used to develop better ways of treating and preventing diseases that affect cattle.
Surely though as well as being able to breed cows that produce more milk and meat those clever genetic experts will be able to engineer a cow that well, to be blunt, farts less? And less methane is good for the planet given it’s 23 times as warming as CO2.
So given time will supercow be a reality? Or do we all need to start eating a lot less meat? I’m more than happy to sacrifice a few cheeseburgers if it means we don’t all end up eating Soylent Green.
Useless fact of the day - “Cattle and humans have about 80 percent of their genes in common”
If books aren’t your thing then how about a trip to 
