Denise’s Story

I never thought I would say I was the owner of a cow. Elizabeth came into my life quite unexpectedly when I found her in a small parcel of outside my neighborhood in 2020, on my 50th birthday. I had always been an enormous cow fan, and moving to Tennessee sure fed that obsession because you cannot go 1/2 a mile without seeing a herd of cattle here. I watched the cows come and go in the field next to my house. Calves were born in the spring, and I watched them grow, and then one day, they were gone...

Elizabeth was only a few months old when I first saw her; I immediately went to say hello. Eventually, I ran into the young man who bottle-fed her and asked if I could visit her daily. Not only was she orphaned, but she was blind in one eye. I thought it was a stubborn infection, but it turns out that regardless of how it started, infection or injury, she was blind in her right eye.

At the end of December, the young man said he didn't want her, and it was time to sell. Before I knew what I was saying, I blurted out that I would take her. As the words came out of my mouth, I looked across the field to my home and realized I would have to move to keep her. Thanks to COVID and the manure-filled year we all had; it wasn’t the best time for any of this to happen.

I attempted to find a farm rescue for her, but they were all full. I tried to find a home for her with people who would care for her as a pet and not put her back into the meat farming grind, but I had no luck. She is a registered Charolais with excellent breeding and would most likely have been used as a breeding cow, but I didn’t want that for her. She was a bit timid and skittish because of her decreased vision. It was necessary to have patience with her, and many farmers don't have the time for vision-impaired cows as it makes them more challenging to handle.

After weeks and weeks of sleepless nights and days filled with crying with worry, my daughter finally encouraged me to keep her. Having never seen me that distraught over anything, she said I needed to keep the cow, no matter what it took. Limited funds, lousy timing, low home inventory, land selling in days...I had to find a way. Even if I could have found someone, giving her to someone else didn't bring me joy and left me in tears.

Fast forward a few months, and you would have found me in McMinnville, TN, on 14 rolling acres I purchased to open Tennessee Cow Rescue. After looking for land for months and miles, I saw this parcel and knew it was the “right” (samma in Sanskrit) place for us. Shortly after selling my house and moving here, Agnes joined us, and it was well-timed because Elizabeth was tired of being alone. Cows are herd animals, and being alone her entire life was hard on her.

The first year, I lived in an RV with Buddha, my 160lb dog, before building a garage with an apartment above. I’ll build a house someday, but right now, I’m too tired, and there are too many other things to do. Building a barn for the animals is also more important than a house for me. After the RV, the apartment is like the Taj Mahal.

We have rescued nine cows, fifteen cats, and a lamb. I was also able to save over a dozen other cows by finding them new homes. I added a roof to an old corral to make a hay barn and summertime shelter; Sanjay, our handicapped mini cow, has his own house in his pasture where he lives with Little, the lamb and our blind calf, Faith. The cows have an additional shelter in the pasture which I had built the fall of 2022 and then doubled in size this past summer, and we have a run-in for cows in quarantine. We recently secured the pasture fence and took down 15 large trees that were either dead or causing issues at the fence line. An ongoing project is to clean out the woods, so we have a clear path to the cave for visitors coming to the farm. We also added a French drain at the haybarn but continue to face drainage issues.

UPCOMING GOALS & PLANS…We need to build a permanent fence for the quarantine pasture. We plan to host two community fund-raising events, one in the spring (vegan BBQ) and one in the fall (kids Halloween/Fall Boo with Moos). Our livestock puppy, Akiva, is a handful and we are working on training him so that one day, he will protect Sanjay and Little from coyotes. Akiva was donated to us by someone in our local community. We reseed the pasture this fall, spending $1,000 in grass see and then got zero rain for months. It’s likely that it was wasted time and money and I worry that the cows will not have enough grass to eat. I bought a tractor that we can not afford and despite a generous nonprofit discount, the payment is painful. It sure makes the work easier and we’ve been able to eliminate hiring someone else with a tractor to complete work here on the farm. I added a blog page to the website to post info on the farm and provide some insights on veganism, animal welfare, etc.

I still haven’t managed to edit and post any of the hundreds of hours of video I have from day one of meeting Elizabeth…I hope to get it uploaded this winter.

(edited/updated 11.22.2023)

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