By Jim Hagarty
1991
Once or twice a month, Canadian Press sends its member newspapers a photo of a rebel steer that had the audacity to jump over a fence or out of a truck in a futile attempt to “make a break for it.” When this happens in the country, no one but the farmer and his neighbours takes much notice. They round up the maverick animal and back it goes to join its fellow cattle who weren’t so brave and elected to stay put. This is an event, given the state of some farm fences and the cantankerous mood of some bovines out there, that is not really very rare in rural areas. It is a concern when cattle get hit by traffic on the road but otherwise, it is not an earth-shattering event.
But let livestock – especially cows, bulls or steers – set one hoof on urban pavement or parkland, and big city news photographers trip over their aperture openings on their way to the scene of the crime. In the last few years, literally dozens of their photos of cattle galloping amidst the traffic on busy city streets have turned up on my desk and I am proud to say that as far as I know, I have never used even one in this section of the newspaper. I guess the sight of a bunch of arm-waving police officers and their posse of ever-helpful passersby trying to chase poor cattle beasts back into the country leaves me a bit grumpy. The cattle know they are not where they are supposed to be – the grazing isn’t that great on those multi-lane expressways – but they must be a bit bewildered, even terrified, to see throngs of people yelling at them as if they were monsters on the loose in a horror movie.
Many of these pictures, for some reason or other, emanate from Calgary, Alberta. Perhaps it isn’t so strange that so many escapee steers would head for there as the city is, after all, located in the heart of cattle country. But Calgary photographers, it seems to me, are almost hypersensitive to this problem of livestock that are absent without leave. The irony in this, for me, is the fact that long before there was such an animal as a Calgary photographer, cattle roamed and grazed and slept and reproduced on the very land on which Calgary and its newspaper offices now sit.
Just who, then, is the real intruder?
Perhaps it is pushing this anti-runaway-cow-photos stance a little too far to suggest that many people in our biggest cities have gotten so far away from their roots, that what was once a natural part of our environment has now become an alien to be driven out of our concrete jungles before they … before they what? Lie down under a maple tree and chew their cud?
Some reporters can walk by street gangs, hookers and people sleeping on sidewalk grates in the winter without ever tripping a shutter. But let a Guernsey gallop through a green light …
As long as city schoolchildren answer “the store” when asked where milk comes from, I guess it shouldn’t surprise me when they grow up to become “photojournalists” who think cattle in the city are big news. But then, maybe someday when fanatics have shut down animal agriculture altogether, we’ll be grateful for these pictures to teach future generations what a cow looked like.
