You cannot make this stuff up, but apparently, SacBee and L.A.Times are giving it the old, college try.

The L.A.Times piece opens with the Pico Rivera great cow escape, but then moves into a history lesson about the California drought of 1864, and what happened to the cattle culture of Southern California. The writer acknowledges it wasn’t pretty, cows died from starvation or were euthanized. Ranchers went bankrupt. All a cautionary tale that we must treat Mother Earth and the animals with more compassion than we do now.

Two of the cows who stayed on the lam were ultimately found and given to an animal sanctuary, so the writer uses the two survivors to home in their object lesson.

One was found roaming around Whittier Narrows Park in South El Monte two days after its escape. The second was found a week later trotting along the 60 Freeway on its way to La Puente. Grammy-winning songwriter Diane Warren and others donated money and time so that the two were spared a trip to the abattoir and instead went to animal advocacy group Farm Sanctuary, which runs a 40-acre rescue ranch in Acton, on the edge of the Antelope Valley.

Jess Due, the nonprofit’s national care director, told me the public was already clamoring to meet the pair, now named June B. Free and Susan. They’re currently in quarantine, a standard procedure for any new animals to ensure they’re disease-free, then will join Farm Sanctuary’s 140 other rescued animals — among them, nine rescued steers and cows — for visitors to coo at and photograph.

I was able to score a private audience with June B. Free and Susan last week.

[…]

They went through a horror movie,” Due said, before yelling at them, “I love you! You’re kinda badasses, you know?”

They were. They were alive. They had cheated certain doom by figuring out how to flee their fate.

Now, let’s see if we can put our allegedly big Homo sapien brains to use to wrangle the stampede of inexorable drought.

My first thought: I wonder what this writer thinks about human trafficking? The illegals full of COVID overrunning the border and affecting the lives of us “big Homo sapiens” in horrific ways? Or how about the Governor of this very state and its elected leaders who make it next to impossible for farmers, ranchers, and small concerns to not only manage a drought, but to make a living?  Has it crossed the writer’s mind that this same Governor, and some of those elected officials, are on the Recall chopping block because us Homo sapiens are fed up with their bad policies that make life near impossible to live in Southern California for both Homo sapiens and bovines?

But let’s weave a tale about how two escaped cows represent our human excesses and their need for survival trumps our own.

So the animal rights activists pay to get them a billboard, which gets them a lot of free press. Fire your publicists! All you really need is to align yourself with some escaped cows.