Gordo In The Lion's Den

Anyone remember the Sunday School story about Daniel in the lion's den? From memory (and we're talking along time ago when I heard this story) Daniel was a christian saint (possibly) who was in the desert (or somewhere) and happened upon a lion. Ok, I'm slightly wishing I hadn't started this now, as my memory of the story is shaky at best and I can't be bothered to research it.

So yeah, back up to the story: Daniel comes happens across a lion. The lion has a thorn in it's paw, which Daniel removes. Years later, Daniel is being fed to the lions in a Roman circus but it turns out that the lion that's sposed to eat him is the very same that he did the whole podiatry thing on all those years ago. The Lion does not eat Daniel.*

This story came to mind as I watched a vet remove a stone from a cow's hoof this week, which, involved getting this limping cow into a cow-sized aluminium cage called a cattle crush. These remind you of something you might find in a bondage club and are designed specifically so that cows can be examined close up without the cow or the person examining the cow being damaged by their panicking or kicking out. The cow has to be herded into a pen, then let through a gate in the pen, through a roughly cow's width corridor and to the end, where you crank a bar down behind their backside and a clamp around their neck. It's the cow sized equivalent to an arm lock and, from there, you open a panel to get to their feet. The affected foot had to be tied to a sort of cow-footstool, not only to prevent it from kicking the vet in the face  but to support it's weight as cows are heavy and don't sit very well on three legs.

The vet set too, washing the cow's hoof and then scraping the hoof with a special knife till she found the offending flint in the cow's hoof. All the while, the cow was not enjoying the experience at all. Which was understandable, as I wouldn't particularly like my foot being poked about if I had a massive splinter in it. Nor did the cow like the stuffing great anti-biotic injection that it got afterwards, with the vet having to make two attempts as the cow was thrashing about too much the first time.

To get back to my original point - and I'm very aware that the whole Daniel in the lion's den story is probably a bit made up - but still, really? Removing a thorn from a lion's paw? Really? Bearing in mind that a cow's main danger to you is it kicking you or squashing you and yet we had to shove this cow into a fairly major bit of iron mongery in order to get near it. And that's without any sharp claws or teeth or predatory instincts.

Anyhoo, the cow was released from the crush and sauntered back to the field, limping slightly less and making a recovery over the course of the rest of the day. Whether it remembers our kind treatment and will repay us I don't know. Again, I remain sceptical.

*My friend Lucy has since corrected me on the actual story of Daniel in the lion's den, which nothing like my version. I may be confusing it with a story about Christian martyrs told by an RE teacher. This all probably happened over 30 years ago.