A Cow, Pig, and Sheep Walk into a Bar

A very short story

---

If you’ve ever worked with livestock then you know each species—cow, pig, sheep—contains individuals that are genuinely smarter than all of the others. I grew up as a wheat farmer’s son so I didn’t work with animals. But, back then, most of my high school best friends were ranch kids and they’d all owned genius creatures.

One of them, Doug, owned a Nietzschean dairy cow. I’m telling you that cow pondered. It made emotional and intellectual judgments. You had to be careful gazing at its udders because those udders sometimes gazed back at you.

My high school girlfriend, Alicia, had a lamb named McArthur that could count. I swear it. He was a prodigy. You’d tell him to tap his hoof three times and he’d do it. You’d tell McArthur to kick the red ball instead of the yellow one and he’d choose correctly. And, yeah, I read somewhere that animals like McArthur are only reading the visual cues of humans when they perform those amazing feats. Those animals are cheating. But even if that’s true then McArthur was still a lamb who could read a human’s facial expressions like a four-legged poker player. In any case, I went to dinner at Alicia’s house one night and I asked her, “How’s McArthur?” and she said, “You tell me, you’re eating him.”

There’s honesty you want. And honesty you don’t want. I finished my plate of McArthur. After dinner, Alicia and I sat on her front porch and told stories and watched the stars until midnight. I wondered if I could find a new constellation shaped like McArthur. And it turned out that you can make any constellation you want from the random assortment of stars in any night sky.