by Shawn Wells

Created on: January 07, 2011

We live in St. Lawrence County, in New York state.  Our area of New York is very rural.  It's in the northern part of the state and although St. Lawrence County is the largest County in New York, it has one of the lowest populations.  The main source of income for people here is agriculture so there are plenty of farms and farm animals around.  Mostly cows.

A little known fact about cows is that they don't like to stay where they live.  Give a cow the chance, and it will wander down the road and just keep going.  I have yet to figure out if this is because the cow lacks the intelligence to know it's a cow, not an explorer, or if the cow actually wants to see if the grass is greener on the other side.

One night a while ago, a group of cows got loose from their farm when a farmer left one of his gates unlocked.  Three or four of his cows got out, and they went wandering down the road.  When this happens in our area, it's our local Sheriff's Department that gets called to corral the animals and bring them back to their barn all nice and safe.  The Deputy Sheriff who got called out this night located the cows easily enough.  Hard to mistake a cow for anything other than a cow.  But now he was faced with a dilemma.  How to encourage these cows to return home?

This Deputy, being a quick thinker, decided it might be best to talk to the cows on their own level.  He decided to use his patrol car's PA system to call "moo" to them, hoping they would follow him back down the road.  I suppose he thought they would mistake his black-and-white car for a black-and-white cow.

So into the microphone he calls: "Moo!  Moooooo!"  Driving slowly down the road, he finds this has no effect.  The cows are continuing away from him, and away from the direction he needs them to go.  I suppose he was confused about why this wasn't working, until the Sheriff's Office dispatcher sent him a radio transmission: "Be advised, you are transmitting across open frequency."

Turns out there are two microphones in the patrol cars up here.  One for the PA system, and one for the police band radio.  The Deputy was using the wrong one!

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