Out-of-the-ordinary ideas

Yesterday, my friend Buren took me to the pasture where his four cows live with a horse named Hard Head, two baby goats and two more cows that belong to his brother, Chris. The pasture looks to me like cow paradise. Acres of green grass, rolling hills, a creek, shade trees, a perfectly weathered barn.

Buren buys his cows as calves from a local dairy farm for $50 a head, then sets them loose in the pasture for a year. They’re bottle-fed at first. At the end of the year, he sells them for meat.
Lately, he’s been thinking about getting a few of his cows pregnant, but not the old-fashioned way.

You may have had occasion to wonder, as I have, how certain ideas originated. Eating snails, for example. Tattoos. Nasal douches.

But this business of artificially inseminating cows is in a league by itself.
What possessed the first man (and I think it’s safe to assume that it was a man) to masturbate a bull to orgasm, then shove a handful of hot bull semen up a cow’s ass?