Thought I'd share......

White River Cow Rescued

In the nursery rhyme, the cow jumped over the moon. In Batesville Tuesday afternoon, one cow found its way into the water at Lock and Dam No. 1 on the White River. At first glance, Kelley Taylor of Imboden couldn’t believe her eyes. “I thought it was one of those fake cows,” she said. “I thought ‘Surely, that’s not a real cow.’ Kelley, who was admiring the outdoor scenery on the balcony at Josie’s at the Lockhouse where she and husband Bryan were eating lunch, thought it was some sort of bad joke when she saw a cow wading in the deep rushing water near the river bank.

All alone on the balcony after Bryan had stepped inside the restaurant, Kelley ran inside Josie’s to try and alert others to what she was seeing in the river. That’s when she found Josie’s waiter Chris Hanson. “I started yelling, ‘There’s a cow in the river! There’s a cow in the river!’” she said. “She came in and said, ‘I don’t know if y’all can do anything but there’s a cow in the river,’” said Hanson, who was waiting tables when Kelley walked in from outside. “I just wanted somebody else to know besides me,” Kelley said. “I just kept thinking, ‘Please somebody save it.’ At about the same time, Josie’s general manager Kimberly Harper said she noticed the cow from her office window and tried to “coax it in,” she said.

With two calls placed to 911, at about 5 p.m. officers with the Independence County Sheriff’s Department, the Batesville Fire Department and emergency management officials soon arrived to the dam with a boat and rope to lead the stranded cow through the swift, muddy current below the dam and back onto dry land. Brent Gleghorn with the Batesville Fire Department said Gary Leonard and Donald Stewart, owners of Leonard and Stewart Farms at 420 Bethesda Road, arrived at the boat dock to pick up the cow. “They didn’t know how it got down there, either,” he said, adding that cows stranded in rivers are not uncommon situations.

A river cow rescue, however,is something Bryan said he and Kelley have only seen on television. “With three kids we watch a lot of TV” especially the Discovery and Animal Planet channels, Kelley said. Still, the couple wished they would have had a way to film the rescue to post on the videosharing Web site, Youtube. However, they did get pictures. “We were enjoying each other’s company and looking at a magazine, so we didn’t actually see her come down the river,” Kelley said.

Having been at Josie’s for about a half hour already, “There’s no telling how long she’d been out there before we saw her.” Kelley said the cow had “an itchin’ will to live,” because it kept trying to keep its head above water even before rescue arrived. What started out as a trip to the doctor’s followed by lunch at Josie’s to “soak up a couple of hours of free baby-sitting” with grandma watching the kids at home, said Bryan, turned into a day Kelley said she plans to put into a scrapbook.
“You don’t expect to look over a balcony and see a cow floating down the river,” she said.

Thought I'd add a little more info here......

I grew up around 3 blocks from this huge river and used to hang around down there a lot riding bikes and prowling around with my friends. I've seen cows floating in it before but none were ever alive. This poor cow here in the pic is very lucky to be alive. It had to have went over the dam to be where it was when rescued. That dam and the river both are very unforgiving and selfish when it comes to taking someones life including that of my grandfather. So many have lost their lives in that river. Mega amounts of water rushing over it along with massive amounts of huge jagged and pointy rocks at the foot of it. Plus that river has a bad undertow that's one main reason so many have drowned in it.

I just can't believe that cow made it through all that. I'm very glad it did though. I'm not sure of the exact distance that the dam stretches across the river, but it's quite a ways. This river also floods very often and does mega damage to everything around it. I haven't been down there in quite some time but they have been changing the lock and dam, not sure what all kind of construction they've done to it though.