In my garden, the daisies on my lawn are giving way to clover and yesterday I saw the first ripe blackberry on a bush growing by the side of the road on my way home from work. High summer is here.Mind you, according to folklore, it is unlucky to eat the season's first blackberries. And I've also been told that clover can be a curse as much as a blessing, particularly for farmers.
I was told by a friend, author Jaine Fenn, who grew up in the country, that if cows eat too much clover they can build up so much internal gas that they explode.
I'm not totally sure she wasn't winding me up. It does sound rather fantastical - and Jaine does have a vivid imagination, as anyone who has read her SF novels Principles of Angels
and Consorts of Heaven
can tell.I haven't investigated clover abuse as a cause of cow explosions yet, but what do you think? Fact or fiction?
Do leave a comment below (but if you have photographic evidence, I'm not that sure I want to see it...)
Links:
http://www.badwitch.co.uk/2008/08/blackberries-and-brambles.html
http://www.orionbooks.co.uk/14398-0/author-Jaine-Fenn.htm
Principles of Angels
Consorts of Heaven
4 comments:
As an SF plot, I suppose cows inflated with intestinal gases after eating clover could indadvertantly save the world from alien invasion by exploding when anally probed by the aliens' cattle-mutilating advance scouts, proving that the human race is too dangerous to take on...
I wish exploding cows were real but I suspect not. If it is then there is an international conspiracy to hide all such news from the public. The Illunminati isn't what it used to be if they feel they have to suppress all news of exploding cows :-).
Nothing on Snopes and when I googled exploding cows you came up on the first page! I wasn't brave enough to look at the pictures and video though
I don't about exploding cows--but the blackberries here are ripe, and I just made my first cobbler! Delicious!
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