Garbage Disposals

I note on my walk around the neighborhood this morning that the cows are ranging ever further away from their pasture. As I have mentioned before, the grass in the pasture is nibbled down to the nub, and so they are out looking for something more substantial, I suppose. What they are finding, however--or what they are clearly preferring--is garbage. From street to street, the cows raid garbage cans, making not a little bit of noise in the process as they overturn the cans and rummage through the goods. One cow had extracted a plastic bag full of something clearly delectable, and as the cow chewed on the bag, the air in the plastic popped like a balloon. The look on the face of that cow was classic--startled, wide-eyed, frozen in mid-chew, glancing warily over its shoulder, as if to say "What the heck? Is someone shooting at me?" 

Of course, it is rather sad that these cows have been driven to eating garbage, and ingesting much of the plastic along with it. I've actually never seen anyone supervising the cows in any way. In fact, the only people I've seen in the pasture have been children flying kites or playing soccer. Sometimes I will see people bring a bunch of garden refuse--grass and weeds and leaves and what-all--from somewhere else and deposit it for the cows; but where the owners might be, and why they are not more energetically providing for their bovine charges, is anyone's guess.