The Cow

There was a cow that lived on a farm. She was young but very smart. She was smart enough to know that ‘farm’ meant ‘place where they will kill my children.’ How she got that smart she could only guess, but with nothing much else to do, she spent a lot of time thinking. She knew the patterns of the farm: She saw the other cows were scared of the barking dog, She knew when gates were opened and closed, She knew the bulgy eyed guy was lazy and opened both of the gates for a time instead of opening one – moving the cows through it – closing it – opening the next one – and then moving the cows through, as the others did. In short, she knew she could escape. “But where would I go?” she thought “There are so many fences, there is no longer a meaningfully definable ‘outside’. “For example” she reasoned “pick any fenced in area, and call that the outside – then everything else is inside. In other words, the space outside all of the worlds fences was of a similar size as all the areas within them. They effectively fenced in that last space without having to do anything.” With no outside, where could she go?

She chewed her cud and thought.