Smart cows and painted Cattle Guards

In The West, with big cattle ranges, it was annoying to have gates at every entrance. You had to get out of your truck, open the gate, drive through, close the gate, sometimes dozens of times a day.

Frustrated, a couple of ranchers got together and invented the cattle-guard. For you easterners, a cattle guard is simply a ditch dug across the road. Then metal bars are laid across the ditch. Trucks and cars can drive over, but cows are kept in.

Works great! Cattle-guards became the rage all over the West. But even cattle-guards had their problems. When you drive over a cattle-guard at fifty miles an hour (the minimum speed for any self-respecting cowboy or cowgirl) it does hellacious damage to the suspension.

So again some ranchers got together to solve the problem.

“Cows are dumb!” one rancher commented. “Let’s just fill the ditches back in and paint stripes where the cattle guard used to be. They’ll think it’s a real cattle-guard.”

“Yep,” the daughter of a rancher said. “They’re conditioned. They’ll think it’s real.”

To whit a cowboy said, “Don’t go on with all that east-coast college learning!”

But I digress.

The point is they tried it and it worked. Cows would go up to the painted cattle-guard, look and think, “yep, that’s a cattle-guard.”

Stopped in their tracks, they’d wander back to their same, safe, old meadow. This went on for years.

But then something shocking happened. One day, the rancher’s daughter and her pain-in-the-butt cowboy friend found a herd of cows out in fresh grass outside a cattle-guard.

“Jeez Louise!” The cowboy blurted out, “How’d that happen!”

Louise thought a moment and then had this insight. She understood that one day, one cow went up to the painted cattle-guard and actually looked at it. Looked at it real hard. Then, in an act of courage, that cow put a hoof on the paint, and thought to herself, “This isn’t real, it’s paint! We’ve been fenced in all years by paint!”

She took another step and then another and soon she was across and in to the most beautiful meadow with the greenest grass she’d ever seen. Not satisfied, she went back and led her entire herd across.

That, my friends, is what we call a Smart Cow.

And the question of course is are we fenced in by imaginary cattle-guards?

How many of our fears, even the deepest held and secret ones, are really just imaginary cattle-guards, painted, not real? It’s an interesting question. Further how often to we give up instead of even challenging those fears? How often do we choose to just be content, fenced in by imaginary boundaries and never discover who we really could become?

In the Talmud it’s written that every living thing has an Angel over it whispering, “Grow, Grow!” To grow, to become who we are meant to be, maybe everyday we ought to take one step over an imaginary cattle-guard.

Because it is just paint.