The internet has fixed all of its collective attention onto Knickers the giant Australian cow, whose bulk serves as inspiration for us all. ABC, the Australian news outlet that covered him a month ago, compared him to Michael Jordan, since the cow is nearly 6’4″, but where the Bulls star earned accolades for his otherworldly skill, Knickers’s appeal is simpler: He simply is. And he’ll continue to be—his size has apparently saved him from the “abattoir,” a dignified word for slaughterhouse.
Too big to die, the Holstein Friesian steer towers above the other cows, and has become the latest “absolute unit” to be memed by social media users. The cow is big. Look at the big cow! “It me”—he is out of place but doesn’t care, a bodacious bovine comfortable in his own skin.
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Something compels you to look at Knickers and apparently something about him compels the other cows too. “Whenever he wants to get up and start walking there’s a trail of hundreds of cattle following him,” Knickers’s owner, Geoff Pearson, told ABC. “You’ll put him in a paddock and all the other cattle seem to get attracted to him.”
He’s described in the ABC piece as a “coach” for the other animals, but perhaps he’s more like a prophet. If you saw something that was like you only huge and freighted with power, would you not want to go wherever it did? Is there not something almost poetic about a domesticated mammal the size of a small car? You look at him and you think, Someday I will die, and you can’t look away.
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