COLFAX TOWNSHIP, Mich. (AP) - A man says he shot and killed a neighbor's cow after mistaking it for a coyote. Good thing it wasn't the other way round: "Hey, Elmer, there's somethin' mighty funky about this here barbecue!"
Authorities and the owner are skeptical. Imagine that.
The undersheriff in northern Michigan's Benzie County says he doesn't see how anyone could confuse a 1,400-pound, pregnant cow with a coyote, which typically weighs 20 to 45 pounds. Maybe he thought it was Chupacabra and he is too embarrassed at the mistake to admit it now.
And anyway, shooting coyotes is illegal during deer-shooting season. Authorities asked the county prosecutor to bring charges. Presumably not for shooting coyotes, though.
The 42-year-old man told authorities he was out to shoot coyotes near his home Saturday when he killed the cow, Undersheriff Rory Heckman said. Heckman said the man then tried to drag the cow home. "Gotta' git that pitcher fer the Guinness book, world's biggest coyote. Who is Guinness anyhoo?"
"The part of his story he his holding to is he shot at a coyote. I don't know how he hit a several-thousand-pound cow mistaking it for a coyote," Heckman said. Must not be a UFO buff or he would have known to blame the cow-killing on ETs.
The cow, named Hannah, had wandered away from her farm. Her farm? Does she have any other calves who can inherit or will it go to the county?
"My husband thought that he should go through some therapy looking at repeated pictures of cows and coyotes, because they look nothing alike," said owner DeAnn Mosher. "It didn't make any sense to me." Must be a lib, first thing she thinks of is sending him to therapy.
#4
I thought coyotes could weight, oh, I don't know, easily 180 lbs and more. I mean, mexicans are not so poor as they used to be, I'm sure they can eat well, and human traffiking is such a money-making business, they've got plenty to spend on food and other stuffs.
#5
Btw, to get back on topic, with what was he shooting? I thought coyotes, groundhogs and other smallish critters were shot with rifles like .222, .223,... I doubt you can kill a cow with anything less than a full-sized rifle round, especially if you shoot far enough to make such a mistake. wouldn't the weapon used be indicative of his intent? Anyway, he needs to pay, for the cow and the calf... idiot, or criminal, you decide.
#6
The full-grown coyotes around here are about the size of a German Shepherd.
Posted by: Deacon Blues ||
11/23/2007 9:40 Comments ||
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#7
the man then tried to drag the cow home.
Cattle rustling used to carry a pretty hefty penalty in the West, and still does in some states. But this is Michigan so I'm guessing he gets off lightly.
OTOH, the herd should sue him for emotional distress, loss of income (the projected milk production of the cow & the calf, assuming it was a dairy herd), loss of fertilization of the pasture .....
#8
Where I grew up in Nebraska - this was a typical way for good old boys to get brisket material for their 20Keg parties...
Only, I don't recall any coyote claim... bad vision dear hunters were a more common claim that was only used if the cops were not interested in a few T-Bones...
#10
It gets better: Family Howls for Justice over Cow's Death
The suspect "authorities said, shot the cow but didn't kill it with the initial shot. He allegedly shot it twice more and chained the bovine to his vehicle.
"I don't know how he hit a several-thousand-pound cow mistaking it for a coyote," said Rory Heckman, Benzie County's undersheriff. "It's hard for him to explain away shooting it two more times and trying to drag it away with his vehicle."
The owner's father said,"I believe if [the suspect] got it to his garage it would have been the last time I seen the cow."
#11
That's sad, cows are nice animals (I live near them), and this guy should be sued off his pants, there's no chance he didn't did it on purpose, and he couldn't even kill her painlessly. So, he's a thief, and an incomptent one too.
#12
Definitely a green horn cattle rustler. I doubt Hannah was coyote ugly. He needs to buy the neighbor another pregnant cow and then pay a fine at the Justice of the Peace Office. This will be a great learning experience for this wanna-be "buffalo hunter".
Posted by: Pecos Bill ||
11/23/2007 13:58 Comments ||
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#13
Shooter Says He Mistook Cow for Coyote
Cows Tales Must Be Shaggy This Year In Benzie County...
Posted by: Red Dawg ||
11/23/2007 15:07 Comments ||
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#14
I couldn't help but think of Wile E. Coyote dressed up like a cow or something.
#16
This bit of foolishness happened next county over from here. Everyone is pretty appalled by the crime, more so by the lameness of the excuse, figuring that even a drunken hunter can tell a small dog sized critter from a cow.
The mook in question is being charged with about five counts
- attempting to take a game animal (coyote) out of season
- no small game license (say, how's that coyote excuse working out for ya?)
- the actual cow murder
- discharge of firearm too near a residence
- some misc. obstruction for lying and trying to hide the crime.
#17
Thanks #10. I had visions of this bozo trying to drag a 2,000 pound cow away from the scene of the crime by hand. I thought, no wonder he got caught.
#1
I mis-read the headline Creator of hurricane insanity scale dies at 90, saw the photo, and thought, "Howard Dean isn't that old, is he???" It still fits, and it's only a shame that poor Howard is still around to amuse and entertain us.
Posted by: Old Patriot ||
11/23/2007 22:31 Comments ||
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#1
Privately, Ugandan communities do have quite strong stereotypes of each other. When a group from one ethnic community is sure that no one among them is an "outsider," their conversation can be shocking.
Despite all this, it is still not kosher to speak of tribalism or call someone a tribalist. The acceptable word is "sectarianism," and Uganda is one of the few countries I know of that some years ago passed a law banning tribalism.
Hey, ya stupid gits! It's "tribalism", got it? Gold plate the turd all you want.
The British singer who sang the Croatian anthem before last night's match accidentally sang 'My penis is a mountain'. Tony Henry was trying to sing the national anthem in Croatian, but reportedly got the words wrong.
Fans say the mispronounciation helped the players relax before the game at Wembley where Croatia beat England 3-2.
The national anthem is written in old style Croatian, and there can be slightly different interpretations in English because it is a very lyrical language. The line in which Henry slipped up should have been "mila kuda si planina" (You know my dear how we love your mountains). But what he actually sang was "mila kura si planina" which means "Dear Penis, you are a Mountain" or "My Dear, my penis is a mountain".
Croat players like Manchester City's Vedran Corluka and Arsenal target Luka Modric started looking at each other and grinning when they realised what he was singing.
Croat fan websites have been calling for Henry to be given a medal of honour for helping the players relax, they also want him made an official team mascot for the tournament. Mate Prlic, publisher of the top Croatian footballing Torcida Magazine said: "It would be great if Tony Henry could join the Croatian team and fans at the European Championship in Austria and Switzerland.
"He obviously relaxed the Croatian players before the match at Wembley and if that's a winning combination why not invite him to join the team at Euro 2008 to keep the winning streak going."
*Great* pics at links. Weird.
Nestling in the foothills of the Alps in northern Italy, 30 miles from the ancient city of Turin, lies the valley of Valchiusella. Peppered with medieval villages, the hillside scenery is certainly picturesque. But it is deep underground, buried into the ancient rock, that the region's greatest wonders are concealed.
Here, 100ft down and hidden from public view, lies an astonishing secret - one that has drawn comparisons with the fabled city of Atlantis and has been dubbed 'the Eighth Wonder of the World' by the Italian government.
For weaving their way underneath the hillside are nine ornate temples, on five levels, whose scale and opulence take the breath away. Constructed like a three-dimensional book, narrating the history of humanity, they are linked by hundreds of metres of richly decorated tunnels and occupy almost 300,000 cubic feet - Big Ben is 15,000 cubic feet.
Indeed, the Italian government was not even aware of their existence until a few years ago.
But the 'Temples of Damanhur' are not the great legacy of some long-lost civilisation, they are the work of a 57-year-old former insurance broker from northern Italy who, inspired by a childhood vision, began digging into the rock.
It all began in the early Sixties when Oberto Airaudi was aged ten. From an early age, he claims to have experienced visions of what he believed to be a past life, in which there were amazing temples. Around these he dreamed there lived a highly evolved community who enjoyed an idyllic existence in which all the people worked for the common good. I'd guess he wasn't recalling a past life in paleoland, an another area known for its underground activities.
More bizarrely still, Oberto appeared to have had a supernatural ability: the gift of "remote viewing" - the ability to travel in his mind's eye to describe in detail the contents of any building. "My goal was to recreate the temples from my visions," he says.
Oberto - who prefers to use the name 'Falco' - began by digging a trial hole under his parent's home to more fully understand the principals of excavation. But it was only as he began a successful career as an insurance broker that he began to search for his perfect site.
In 1977, he selected a remote hillside where he felt the hard rock would sustain the structures he had in mind. A house was built on the hillside and Falco moved in with several friends who shared his vision. Using hammers and picks, they began their dig to create the temples of Damanhur - named after the ancient subterranean Egyptian temple meaning City of Light - in August 1978.
As no planning permission had been granted, they decided to share their scheme only with like-minded people. Volunteers, who flocked from around the world, worked in four-hour shifts for the next 16 years with no formal plans other than Falco's sketches and visions, funding their scheme by setting up small businesses to serve the local community.
By 1991, several of the nine chambers were almost complete with stunning murals, mosaics, statues, secret doors and stained glass windows. But time was running out on the secret. The first time the police came it was over alleged tax evasion and still the temples lay undiscovered. But a year later the police swooped on the community demanding: "Show us these temples or we will dynamite the entire hillside."
Falco and his colleagues duly complied and opened the secret door to reveal what lay beneath. Three policemen and the public prosecutor hesitantly entered, but as they stooped down to enter the first temple - named the Hall of the Earth - their jaws dropped.
Inside was a circular chamber measuring 8m in diameter. A central sculpted column, depicting a three dimensional man and woman, supported a ceiling of intricately painted glass. The astonished group walked on to find sculpted columns covered with gold leaf, more than 8m high.
Stunned by what they had found, the authorities decided to seize the temples on behalf of the government.
"By the time they had seen all of the chambers, we were told to continue with the artwork, but to cease further building, as we had not been granted planning permission," says Esperide Ananas, who has written a new book called Damanhur, Temples Of Humankind.
Retrospective permission was eventually granted and today the 'Damanhurians' even have their own university, schools, organic supermarkets, vineyards, farms, bakeries and award-winning eco homes. They do not worship a spiritual leader, though their temples have become the focus for group meditation. 'They are to remind people that we are all capable of much more than we realise and that hidden treasures can be found within every one of us once you know how to access them,' says Falco.
BEIJING
Thirty-one people are thought to have died after the bus they were traveling in was buried in a landslide near the Three Gorges Dam reservoir in central China, state media reported Friday.
Rescue workers found the vehicle buried in rubble on a hillside in Hubei Province early Friday after its owners reported it missing, the official Xinhua News Agency said. Among the victims was a 4-month-old baby.
A construction worker working on a railway tunnel further up the hill in Badong County was also killed. Two other workers are still missing, the report said.
The accident happened Tuesday on a highway near the Yangtze River.
Xinhua said there has been heavy rain in the area in recent days, but government officials warned in September that rising water levels in the reservoir have also increased the risk of landslides.
The bus was returning to the province from Shanghai and most of the passengers who died came from the nearby town of Lichuan.
Xinhua quoted local officials as saying that 31 people were on the bus and all are feared dead.
State TV showed pictures of rescue workers sifting through the earth and huge boulders blocking the road, which is cut into a steep hillside.
About 3,000 cubic meters of debris poured onto the highway during the landslide, Xinhua said, revising the extent of the landslide debris up from 1,000 cubic meters.
"About 50 meters of highway section is covered with rubble and boulders, with the largest measuring up to 900 cubic meters. It has been very difficult for us to carry out the search," a member of the rescue team said.
Emergency crews began to remove bodies from the bus Friday afternoon and continued clearing the road, which is the main highway between Hubei and Tibet.
The government has in recent weeks attempted to play down the scale of the environmental damage created by the massive Three Gorges Dam project after officials said in September that it could spark an "environmental catastrophe" if preventative measures are not taken to reduce the risk of landslides and water pollution.
Methinks the euro is headed for the mother of all dives. Why bother opening a factory in Prague when New York is cheaper?
PRAGUE -- When I first moved here in 1991, I remember hiking with my girlfriend in the mountains in Slovakia. We had just finished a long climb and had stopped at a little isolated chalet for a bite to eat. "Pssst," I heard a man's voice from the side of the cabin. "Do you have any dollars you want to sell?"
Those were the days. The dollar was so popular back then that there were literally guys in the woods looking to buy them. The official rate at the time was around 25 crowns to the dollar, but I think we bid that guy up to 30 or 40 -- the best currency trade I ever made.
The mighty sure have fallen. Pity the poor American tourist these days who arrives in Prague with a wallet full of dollars and some outdated notions of how everyone loves the greenback. He's in for a shock.
The dollar peaked at about 40 crowns five years ago and has been falling ever since. The drop accelerated this year as the dollar plunged below 20. Now it's trading just north of 18, and no one dares predict a bottom.
Taxi drivers long ago stopped taking them. Shop clerks look at them like they've never seen a dollar before. I even think I detected a sneer by the girl at the exchange counter the other day as I waited for some friends to change money. Dollar holders can't seem to buy any respect.
Some of my compatriots have weathered the storm by buying property or finding jobs paid in euros or crowns. Other dollar-earners rush with their weekly paycheck to fast convert it into a stable reserve currency -- like the Czech crown. I was lulled for a time by the dollar's strength -- remember those days not so long ago when the Fed actually intervened to support the euro? -- and was slow to adjust.
This year I finally decided to buy an apartment and have been racing against the clock to cash out of dollars. Each day's delay seems to kick up the price by a couple thousand.
Prague used to be known as a cheap destination, a Paris for the young post-Cold War generation. I still remember fondly all those travel articles about $2 meals and quarter glasses of beer. Beer is still relatively affordable at between $1-2 a glass, but the fun stops there. I wandered into a restaurant the other day for lunch and ordered a cheeseburger. It was a nice place, but nothing special. The bill came to $21, fries included.
For the moment, I'm being prudent and hoping for the best. While no one expects the dowdy dollar to rebound any time soon, I'm praying that at least the currency finds a floor. In the meantime, I can console myself with one of those $2 glasses of beer.
#7
P: Idgit shoulda gone to McD's. They exist in Prague. I'm sure the Big Mac Index hasn't collapsed.
As of Nov 13, 2007:
Not an agreeable surprise for fast food lovers, however quite an objective economic indicator.
It results from the comparison made by Mf Dnes in the way set up by The Economist. The idea is to collect prices of Big Macs in different countries and use them as a base for estimation of exchange rates.
Ten years ago, Big Mac cost 51 CZK, which at that time when one dollar cost 27,60 CZK was about 1,85 $. In the US the 200g burger cost 2,36.
At the end of 2007, price of that mastodontic burger is 63 CZK. In the US it is, according to latest figures, 3,41 $, and as one dollar costs 18,30 CZK now, that makes 62,40 CZK apiece, less than in the Czech Republic.
We have caught up with the US in the price, but salaries are a different thing. A new employee of the CR branch of Mac Donalds earns 0,85 of Big Mac an hour, in the US it is for the same job 2,59 of the burger.
In other words, prices are higher in Czechia than in New York, but wages are lower. Like I said, the European currencies are on the verge of a major collapse. It's just a matter of a few years, if that.
#8
Dumbass, now is the time to buy, when value is low, in a few years when the dollar rebounds, you could easily be a millionaire.
The best way is to take 1/2 your salary and buy dollars, do this each paycheck, store the actual dollars at home, wait.
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
11/23/2007 15:42 Comments ||
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#9
Yep, Redneck Jim, I am sitting on any USD I have and I am getting, tooth and nail. I don't have enough to become rich, but I am sure it will be counted one nice day.
Zhang Fei: Like I said, the European currencies are on the verge of a major collapse. It's just a matter of a few years, if that.
Yea, it is obvious, and few years is my guesstimate. What amazes me is that not many do see it.
#10
I call BS. Was in Prague a couple a months ago after the dollar had substantially moved against the Euro and the Crown. Stayed in a legitimate 4 star hotel for about $140/night, had an an outstanding romantic candlelight dinner for about $80 and had to spend some greenbacks the first day in town which were happily received.
The mind reels contemplating what kind of hotel you'd get for $140 a night in NYC.
#1
As Muslims continue to spread across the globe and strip all non-Muslims of their human rights, there will be a World War III against this new form of Facism.
#2
Although the current constitution does not specifically mention this, any person found 'guilty' of following or preaching , or simply reading texts of other religions are punished till he or she returns to Islam. Religious thoughts that contradicts the state's version of Islam are also not tolerated and a person can even be punished for carrying a Buddha or wearing a cross.
#3
Bombing the sh$$ out of the Maldivan parlaiment will do wonders for correcting that attitude, just as it would in any other nominally muslim country. The entire world should boycott the Maldives from this day until those rules are rescinded. If they're NOT rescinded, then the Maldivans can eat cocoanut and raw fish until genetic defects kill them all.
Posted by: Old Patriot ||
11/23/2007 22:48 Comments ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Anthem gaffe 'helped Croatia' 
