TRUE STORY
In July 2011, a black Angus cow escaped from her farm on Prindle Hill Road, near the town line dividing Orange and Milford, Connecticut. No one claimed her. She was spotted over the next five months roaming the area with a herd of deer. (Cows have been known to hang out with deer.)
It wasn’t until November that the locals got worried the cow would forage over a wider area once there were no more leaves or grass to eat. That’s when Rick George, the animal control officer for both Milford and Orange, hatched a plot to trap the cow and either return her to the Milford farm she came from, or transfer her somewhere else.
Because they only saw her at night--the deer taught her to travel in the dark--animal control officer Rick George and the state agricultural department and veterinarians he recruited to help round up the cow didn't see her udder. They thought she was a castrated bull, the reason she had no horns. They referred to “him” as Waldo.
After twice trying and failing to capture Waldo, the experts finally realized Waldo wasn’t a bull after all. Now they called her Wilhelmina.
After Wilhelmina was seen in Milford’s Calf Pen Meadow neighborhood, Rick George and about nineteen other experts finally succeeded in capturing her. On their third attempt, on December 14, they lured the cow with molasses-soaked grain, corralled and tranquilized her, and unceremoniously scooped her up into a steel cage on a flatbed truck.
From there, Wilhelmina was taken to an animal sanctuary, a farm in Oxford, Connecticut, about twenty miles away, where she was expected to spend the rest of her days.
The real Wilhelmina after she was tranquilized and captured, en route to her forever home in Oxford, Connecticut after protracted, global controversy over her destiny. She was cheered on by Milford townsfolk. Some saw her often in their backyards in Calf Pen Meadow, the Colonial-era field where loyal Americans hid their cattle from British soldiers in the American Revolution. At one point in her five-months "astray," our heroine even had her own Twitter handle!
