A Cow Got Stuck On A Roof — We Have Nothing Else To Add, Really

If this photo of a cow stuck on a roof isn’t the weirdest thing you see this week, well, you must lead a pretty weird life. Because it’s hard to know what else to say when you see a photo of a cow on a roof. And apparently, this isn’t some kind of set-up, staged shot, or a Photoshop job. This cow somehow got onto the roof all by herself.

The photo was snapped by a bicyclist named Rolf Steiner in Bern, Switzerland, who was pedaling on past this farmhouse when he spotted the cow on the roof.

“I couldn’t believe my eyes and had to look three times to make sure I was seeing what I thought I was seeing,” Steiner told the U.K.’s Mirror newspaper. “A cow on the roof.”

And what do you do when you see a cow on a roof? You take a picture, of course. Or two.

So what the heck is this all about? How did the cow get on the roof? How else? It jumped up there, according to its owner Dieter Mueller, who owns both the rogue cow and the farmhouse that served as the cow’s perch, albeit only briefly.

The situation appears to be this: the cow was grazing in back of the farmhouse and felt it needed a fresher pasture. Rather than walk all the way around to the front of the farmhouse, the cow saw a shortcut. It jumped up on the steep, low-hanging roof.

The cow then climbed to the top of the farmhouse and down the other side — when the cow realized that getting down off the steep roof was going to be considerably more tricky than getting up on to it.

While Steiner, and presumably anyone who saw his photo of the cow on the roof, found the whole situation astonishing — a once-in-a-lifetime sight — Mueller was mostly just annoyed by the whole cow-on-roof episode. That particular cow, he says, is a problem child.

“She always was one of my most cantankerous beasts, always wanting to do it her way, not mine or the herd’s. I tried to chuck a broom at her to get her off, and put a ladder there but I didn’t use it, as I was worried she’d fall on top of me,” he explained, quite reasonably. “She would have stayed up there for eternity if she had wanted to. I tried to coax her off when I first saw her but she wouldn’t budge. She had to do things in her own sweet time. And I am left with the bill for replacing the tiles she smashed.”

The cow eventually climbed back up the roof, down the other side, and jumped off into the same pasture it tried to abandon in the first place.

[Images: CEN]