Tuesday, April 3, 2018

FEARLESS GIRL versus THE ONE-TON BULL: A REALITY CHECK


The internet has been awash with posts and articles emoting over the “Fearless Girl” statue on Wall Street. In case you missed it, the Fearless Girl looks to be about 7-8 years of age, and she is defiantly staring down the rampaging bull statue. She stands there, arms akimbo, chin jutted out, directly in the path of an angry-looking bull which, if it were a real bull, appears to weigh somewhere in the neighborhood of a ton. According to the conventional wisdom she’s “fearless,” she’s “brave,” she sends a powerful message as an icon of feminine empowerment, it just makes you want to melt and run down into a puddle of politically correct warm fuzziness.


Speaking as someone who has a small amount of experience with cattle, allow me to introduce a dash of reality to the interpretation of Fearless Girl versus the Rampaging Bull. Best case scenario, she’s about to get flattened; worst case scenario, she’s about to get gored and tossed. Either way, she’s headed for the nearest emergency room if she’s lucky, or to the funeral home if she’s not.


If, when I lived on a farm, I looked out in the pasture and saw a child confronting a charging bull like that, it would scare me half to death. It should scare the bejabbers out of anybody who had one eye and half sense.  We’re not talking fearless girl here, we’re talking brainless girl. Once when I was a senior in high school, playing defensive tackle on the football team, I had a confrontation similar to brainless, I mean Fearless Girl's. Let me tell you about it.


I was 6’2”, weighed 190 pounds, a respectable weight for a lineman back in the 1960’s, and I had extensive experience bulldogging, wrestling, and throwing cattle. Let’s just say I had a fair knowledge of how to get an uncooperative bovine horizontal on the ground.  I was trying to pen an 800 pound cow (not bull, cow) so that she could be treated for pinkeye. She was part Hereford, but mostly Florida scrub cow, and I think she may have had a little antelope in her, too. She had a majestic expanse of  razor-sharp horns. I think one reason she was so skinny was that those horns were so big they were making her poor to tote them.


If one of our cows had a personality, we gave it a nickname. We called this one Crazy, and she was living up to her name that day. She was being very uncooperative. We finally got her hemmed up to send down an alleyway toward the pen, but she didn’t want to go into the pen. She hesitated at the gate a moment,  did a 180 degree turn, lowered her head, and came charging at me like she wanted to use one of her horns for a paper spindle and my stomach for a sheet of paper.


This is the confrontation: An 800 pound heifer that looks like she needs a worming and a square meal is bearing down on a burly football lineman who knows how to throw cattle to the ground. I did not put my hands on my hips, jut out my chin, and confront the rampaging bovine with a resolute expression on my face. I had two choices, fight or flee. If I decided to fight, all I had to do was grab her horns, ride her a ways, twist her head up, and bring her to the ground. No sweat. Of course if I missed the horns, the horns might not miss my stomach. I decided to flee. I jumped the fence without even touching it. [Footnote 1] The only time in my life that I ever jumped higher was once when I was working taking down an old fence. I squatted down to pull the bottom staple on the hogwire, heard a rustling under me, looked around, and realized I had accidentally sat down on a 6’4” rattlesnake. [Footnote 2]


I admit that a statue of my encounter with the scrawny heifer would not be as inspiring as the Wall Street statue of brainless, I mean Fearless Girl encountering the gigantic bull, and you might think that I took the wimp's way out of my confrontation; but I survived with my intestines inside my abdomen and I eventually got the cow penned. Fearless Girl’s prospects of surviving are not quite so good.


In summary: The Fearless Girl statue probably doesn’t inspire admiration in anyone who knows much of anything about the physics of collisions between one ton projectiles and 45 pound targets. It reminds me of those internet clickbait sites that advertise pictures of people doing dumb things just moments before they get themselves killed.


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[Footnote 1] My father finally decided that Crazy was too crazy to mess with and took her to market. We had to load her into the truck twice. The first time we got her in the truck, she jumped out over the sideboards of the cattle body. The next time we got her in, we tied her down to keep her from jumping out. The story of how we got her to market is a saga in itself. She didn’t sell for much, but I was glad to get rid of her.
[Footnote 2] The snake was lethargic from just having eaten, and consequently did not bite me. If it had bitten me, I would have found out who my true friends were on my labor crew when the time came to suck the poison out of the snakebite on my derriere.

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