My immediate reaction upon hearing that a Beefalo was on the loose in Plymouth, Connecticut was to wonder, “Did they just say beefalo?” Yes, they did.
A beefalo (I’ve since learned) is a cross between a buffalo and a cow that is raised to produce larger and leaner quantities of meat per animal slaughtered. Google it; they’re pretty badass.
My second reaction upon hearing that a beefalo was on the loose in Plymouth, Connecticut was to wonder, “Where the heck is Plymouth, Connecticut?” though I never found out because I spent an hour looking at pictures and videos of beefalo.
My third reaction upon hearing that a Beefalo was on the loose in Plymouth, Connecticut was to wonder how he got there (he escaped from a meat processing plant avoiding certain slaughter) and my fourth reaction was to wonder why that was the police department’s problem.
The Plymouth Police Department reveled in being out front of the story perhaps hoping a good collar would benefit their brand. Instead, it made the Beefalo a vigilante and greatly increased his following.
The escape garnered enough attention to give him a nickname. Buddy the Beefalo’s continued success at evading capture made him a legend.
This was in early August.
After his first month without capture, the police union pivoted the high-profile story to their favor by organizing a Go-Fund-Me campaign to buy Buddy’s freedom and to arrange for his post-capture care at Critter Creek Farm Sanctuary in “sunny Florida.”
They always describe it as “sunny Florida,” even in the months where Florida seems to have gotten one hurricane after another.
The police union has raised $8,536 from 289 donors.
Not to be deterred, the people responding printing t-shirts saying, “Run Buddy Run;” pranksters put inflatable bulls by the roadside to throw the police off his trail.
The police claim to be doing their best to catch him, but it’s now been over three months and counting and they seem to have run out of gas.
At first they got all police-y describing Buddy as “highly aggressive” and a security concern at nearly 2,000 pounds. Reports of the initial encounter say that, “police on the midnight shift saw the animal Wednesday near Route 72 and tried to capture it, but the beefalo puts its head down and scratched at the ground as if it was going to charge, so officers moved away and the animal went into the woods.”
Things quickly escalated as state environmental conservation officers swarmed the area with drones tracking him down to a swampy area in the woods.
It was determined that tranquilizing Buddy in that area and trying to remove him would likely hurt him so after briefly considering using female cow scents to lure him out, the police then adopted a wait-and-see approach with a “trap” that would make Wile E. Coyote jealous.
The Plymouth Police Department’s trap consists entirely of a horse trailer, two gates, and a bucket full of grain. They haven’t caught Buddy yet but they’ve gotten some beautiful pictures of local deer.
They posted an officer near the trap at night, since beefalo have nocturnal tendencies, but the officer couldn’t see anything because it was dark.
So they added a spotlight.
But then Buddy stopped coming by their trap so they worried the spotlight was too bright and switched to night vision.
Around this point they rebranded their stakeouts as “steakouts” and began live tweeting. Beefalos may not like spotlights but the Plymouth Police Department loves them.
The more attention they got, the less of a threat Buddy became. Residents called for changing the school mascot to a beefalo.
The police captain appeared on morning radio. Local TV news crews created graphics.
There are even dueling Twitter accounts.
Buddy is an out-and-out star.
It hit critical mass last week when the police department debuted a mascot-like Buddy the Beefalo to join Batman at the police department’s trunk-or-treat Halloween party.
My cynical impulses are to mock the attention or belittle the police for taking such a soft-handed approach to solving a seemingly easy problem. Even frontier kids who grew up with a cast iron skillet for a school house knew how to wrangle a cow.
Plus, my legal training kicked in wondering how fortunate a trial lawyer would be if he could play all of this publicity back on the town like a gold-plated fiddle should Buddy ever maul anyone or cause a life-altering accident to an unlucky motorist.
Especially after reading sentences like this in the Hartford Courant, “Beefalo are mostly active at night, which makes the effort to catch him more urgent. He’s been seen crossing Route 72, and police say they want to avoid any traffic accidents.”
But all of that was when Buddy was just a feel-good story from a distant town out in the middle of nowhere Connecticut.
While driving around recently (having just moved two towns over from my previous home, I sometimes take random turns to see what’s where), I was shocked to pass a sign for Plymouth, Connecticut.
Turns out, I moved just outside of nowhere. How close? Let’s just say it’s within grazing distance.
Suddenly the rustle of leaves sound ominous bringing to mind the initial police description of a 2,000 pound animal “scratching at the ground as if he were going to charge.”
Vigilantes are cool until they might be hiding out in your backyard.
My eyes now instinctively go to the horizon wondering if a beefalo will burst through the tree line at a mad gallop seeking vindication for the months-long hunt he can’t shake.
We live next to a reservoir and I imagine 2,000 pound beefalos get awfully thirsty. Every tree limb outside my window at night is suddenly shaped like a beefalo horn.
Complicating matters is that I keep getting mail for the old owners from Heifer International. Is that a coincidence or is Buddy taunting me?
Yesterday, I took my 21-month-old daughter Senita for a walk through the neighborhood and she joyfully pointed out every pumpkin that we passed, which made me look at them all a little closer. In doing so I noticed that several along the road behind us had been partially eaten.
Almost as if an animal had grazed by eating just a little here and a little there. I’m sure it was Buddy.
Then, this morning, just outside my front door, my own pumpkin had a beefalo-sized bite taken out. Even though we’re still not finished unpacking, it might already be time to moove again.
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