Through Fire and Fear

Trigger warning: gun violence and photos of a badly injured cow.

The look in her remaining eye was proud. Determined. A maggot wiggled in her other eye socket, burrowing into the dead, black flesh. Even from a distance, the stench of infection was overpowering. She kept her distance, watching us warily.

This poor cow had been shot in the face in her own pasture, among her herd, while grazing peacefully. The thought of it—how incredibly sensitive cows are, how the sound of gunfire must have terrified them, how she had suffered alone for months—brought tears to my eyes.

The farmer, desperate to get her help, wanted to surrender her to us. I was scared. Our emergency rescue fund was already dangerously low after saving four piglets. But I knew in my bones that we had no choice. We had to help her.

The farmer told us the gunshots had been coming on and off for a long time, that other cows had been shot but somehow healed. When we arrived, I feared we’d find more injured cows. Instead, we found a skittish herd on a vast, muddy hillside, their fear palpable. Bullet holes riddled an outbuilding near their pasture. The woods loomed dark around us.

The injured cow reminded me of Penny Power, one of my first rescues—feisty, tough, full of spirit. In my mind, I started calling her Shakti, after the fierce and powerful Hindu deity.

We almost had her on the trailer that first Friday. Then she spooked and jumped a fence taller than me. The farmer reported more shooting the next morning. We asked the police to come in with us, but they never called back. Shakti was running out of time, so we had to try.

With reinforcements and a new plan, we managed to separate her from the herd a few times, but each time, she panicked and leapt the fence. Frightened and injured, she was fast—cows can run up to 25 miles an hour, even through deep mud, even up and down steep hills. And Shakti did. For hours.

Almost every time we do a rescue like this, the animals respond to our calm. But this herd’s terror was unlike anything I had seen. I once rescued cows from a farm where they had been slaughtered in front of each other—where the farmer believed that fear made the meat taste better. Even they were less frightened than Shakti’s herd.