EGG-EATING COW

Greymouth Evening Star, 8 May 1936, Page 10

EGG-EATING COW

SOME DEPRAVED TASTES Many cows have depraved tastes. I suppose, states a writer in the ‘Calcutta Statesman,’ there is nobody anywhere over 14 years of age who is not aware that cows very often sneak the washing off the line and eat it. In India, when they sneak a dhoti, or a sari, or a safa. all of which may be 18 yards long or more, they may be seen trotting down the bazaar with the ends trailing out of their mouths, and the owners hot in pursuit behind. When a cloth, the top end of which has been ruined, has been retrieved, the pursuer does not give a cow a hiding. He says, and this I have heard twice: “Yeh gai ki nas hojawe” —“May this cow be destroyed.” The expression is pretty severe, but not severe enough to induce any cow to give up eating cloth.

These remarks have been induce ! , by a letter from a man of waste places and the winds, who writes on ; the subject of egg-eating cows. He ! says that once, when prospecting in one of the creeks running into Lake Rotomahana, New Zealand, he camped for some time on the property of a Maori farmer who had an English imported cow. Though fodder was abundant all the year round, this cow i had contracted the egg-eating habit. It had an uncanny scent for a nest, and would then scare the lien off and eat the eggs. If the eggs were already hatching dr hatched, the cow did not care. It ,}voul(l eat the chickens. The man of the wilds, the prospector and explorer, npw proceeds to tell the story of this cow and a swan. The cow, wandering about in the creek, found the swan jsi.ttipg on her nest. Sjy.ans are a .different proposition from hens, ducks, and geese. 'This one, though nuzzled at, refused to leave her nest. So the cow kicked her out and kijlpd her. In the nest were seven half-grown sygppts. The cow did not turn up for milk-

ing that night, or next jporning, She was found later in the day. after a search, lying on the dead swan with the seven young birds fighting for her teats. The acclimatisation officer took a

snapshot of this extraordinary scene, and a copy is, or was for many years, in 'a New Zealand museum.