Colossal cow will escape slaughter because it’s too big
The world’s biggest cow will be saved because its 6-foot-4 frame is too big to fit into a slaughterhouse, a farmer revealed.
Knickers, a 7-year-old Holstein Friesian, is more than twice the size of the rest of the herd in Myalup, Western Australia.
Holstein-Friesians are a dairy breed and normally weigh in at about 1,500 pounds and stand about 4-foot-1 tall.
Even the breed’s bulls reach just 5-foot-10 and weigh 2,200 pounds.
Butchers say the giant would produce around 1,400 pounds of trimmed “saleable” beef – enough for 450 cuts of steak and 815 pounds of ground beef.
The bovine behemoth stands head and shoulders above other farm animals and weighs in at an incredible 1.4 tons (3,083 lbs).
Owner Geoff Pearson – whose cow is the biggest of its breed in Australia – said: “It was too heavy. I wouldn’t be able to put it through a processing facility.
“So I think it will just live happily ever after.”
The beast cost owners about $285 and they bought him as a “coach” to take charge of the herd.
Knickers is technically a steer – which is a castrated male bovine.
Geoff continued: “When he was young, when we first got him, we had a Brahman steer which was a friend of his. So his name was bra … so we (had) bra and knickers. We never thought he would turn into a big knickers.”
Pearson owns about 20,000 cattle.
He revealed the giant is also a big hit with the other cattle, who follow him around the paddocks.
Many of the cattle are Wagyu and are dark brown, so mighty Knickers stands out even more in a pack because of his color.
But despite his giant size, the towering farm animal is amazingly not the tallest cow ever recorded. In 2010, a Chianina ox named Bellino was measured at just over 6-foot-7 at a cattle show in Rome.