01/17/01

Ziggy Moskowitz got close to breeding out all the off-colors in his herd and claimed to have produced several perfect red heifers befitting the standard of Numbers 19. But Ziggy was apparently of failing sight and had trouble discerning charcoal in the cows’ lashes. And so he was turned away by his religious advisers. Somehow Phil Palfrey caught wind of Ziggy’s enterprise in the mid 90's, while he headed up Route 17 on his way to visit a Joseph Smith site upstate along the Susquehanna (religious nut jobs really do have a special way of finding one another, don’t they) and the two discussed contingencies for the cows to go to Phil on the Palfrey farm in the event that Ziggy— by then an old man— became too ill to keep them any longer. The goal I guess was to keep trying to produce a perfect red heifer which could then be secretly cloned and birthed in Israel, or some shit like that.

Porch Rot had that big ol’ pole barn still standing at the time with all its automated gates and its fancy milking parlor. Those poor little red cows had all they could do to survive on the place until they became acclimated. Sticking pet cows in a place like that is almost like signing their death warrant, really. The stress is often too much on them. They’re out of their element. It’s like the same effect this old, stinky farmer experiences when I go to mass every decade or so. . .

One day in ‘97, Ziggy’s sons arrived at the Palfrey farm with legal paperwork and a cattle truck to haul the Sullivan Reds away. Ownership was never formally transferred to Phil before that time, but a large stack of cash was involved to soothe any hard feelings that may have been felt by the Palfreys with the sudden reduction of the farm’s milk output, such as it was. Porch Rot was OK with it all but Clean Phil threw a fit and called the State Police seeking to stop the transfer, arguing that ownership of the cattle had been placed with him by old man Moskowitz. The police took a look at the Moskowitz brothers’ documents and ordered that Phil stand down. Seems the sons were rather secular in their outlook and were quite appalled by their father’s intentions to use cows to touch off Armageddon. They were determined to do anything they could to stop their father’s madness and preserve whatever comedic legacy he had left.

And so it was that the last know herd of Sullivan County Reds were hauled off from the Palfrey Farm to oblivion. But better a small herd of sub-standard cattle go that route, I say, than all of fucking humanity.