One good reminder deserves another.................you've sparked a memory of my soil reclamation days. We were working behind a pipeline crew in Saskatchewan, reseeding and fencing the right of way after they had backfilled their ditch. One of the last tie-ins they had left was a real deep hole, and every night they'd put up T-posts and orange snow fence to keep people or critters from falling in. In short, it was a liability measure.
Obviously a plastic snow fence isn't going to stop a determined cow, and we came on site one morning to find 4 hooves staring up at us from the bottom of the excavation. About the same time that the farmer arrived on site, yelling about how it had to be his best show cow, because she didn't come up to the yard for feed this morning etc, etc, etc, we were lifting a cow out of the ditch with a backhoe. Mysteriously this top show cow, presumably from the nasty fall, had lost one eye, had it stitched up, had frozen her ears, tail and nose, all of which healed and scarred over by morning, and had lost 4-500lbs. She must have been shown in the "Most Brands" category of the show as well, and judging by the number of them she was carrying, I'll bet she won every ribbon from Moose Jaw to Moosomin.
Of course the oil company, distraught over the whole ordeal, agreed to the man's request of $5000 for potential loss of income and replacement value of his priceless animal. It was a sad day indeed. :wink: