Each "Cowch" is hand-made, signed and numbered by Helga Tacreiter. 

This one is black & white as shown, newborn size, 3 ft.

Cows and Cowches

by Helga Tacreiter

I LOVE COWS. Big, beautiful, breathing cows. I grew to love them when I worked on farms, milking and feeding these peaceful creatures and getting to know their distinct individual personalities. My heart broke each time one of my friends was sent to slaughter, which is the sad reality of farm life. But what could I do? I made their lives as decent as possible while they were in my care, then I had to kiss them goodbye.

Until the storm: a huge spring storm that lasted most of the night, with roaring thunder and lightning bolts hurtling down with deafening cracks.

In the morning, when I went out to feed the cows, I found them beneath a split and blackened tree, all dead. Six little calves huddled together a few feet away. As I led the orphans back to the barn, something inside me changed. The years of accepting sad reality were over. If these little guys had survived an act of God as powerful as that storm, they sure weren't going to be killed by an act of man, not if I could help it!

That's how the cow sanctuary began.

Trouble was, I wasn't a rich heiress. I was a farm worker making minimum wage. These calves weren't even mine. They belonged to the man who owned the farm. How was I going to save the calves?

I exchanged six months' wages for the lives of those calves. Never was money better spent, I thought as I hugged them. But what next? They were growing fast and would soon weigh at least half a ton each. No matter how hard I worked, farm wages weren't going to be enough to feed them. "How? How? How?" filled my thoughts.

The answer came to me as I lay in the straw snuggling with my cow family: I'd make life-size stuffed cows for others to snuggle the way I snuggled with my real cows.

Then again, "How?" I'd made an apron and an A-line skirt in eighth grade Home Ec class, but that was the sum total of my sewing experience.

The answer to ths "How?" came most amazingly.

Knowing only that I had to start with material, I bought several yards of fake fur at the fabric store. One evening after the feeding was done, I sat on a bale of straw and stared at my package, wondering how in the world to begin.

As I sat, Harvey, my favorite cow, came to the barn door and mooed to come in. This was unusual; he almost never left the others. I looked outside and saw that the cows had all gone down to the woods, which is what they usually did after eating.

"Maybe [Harvey] wants a treat," I thought, and offered him grain. He didn't take it, though he loved grain. He followed me around as I swept the floor so I could lay out the material on it. When I moved, he followed at my heels. When I stopped, he stopped. This not how cows behave.

I sat back down on the bale of straw and looked at him. "What do you want, Harvey?" I wondered aloud. He, of course, said nothing, just looked back at me calmly with his huge brown eyes.

"Could it be," I thought, "that he's offering to help?"

I took the material out of the bag and, instead of laying it out on the floor, draped it carefully over Harvey's back. He continued to stand calmly. Suddenly, it became obvious how to make the pattern. I chalked lines where his legs were and cut away the extra fabric. Harvey stayed perfectly still. I used duct tape to hold the pieces together, not wanting to risk sticking him with pins.

For five hours, Harvey stood perfectly still while I fitted the pieces of material around him. Finally, he was completely enveloped in a fake fur cow suit. I marked the pieces, then took them off him. When I was done, he moved for the first time; he went to the door and asked to go out. I walked him to the woods to join the others, awed by what had happened. Then I went back to the barn and sewed the pieces together. By sunrise, the first Cowch was born.

Ten years have passed since then, and the Cowches have fed the cows the whole time. I make them on an old Singer sewing machine, next to a window through which I can watch my cow family grazing peacefully...

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All Cowch sales directly support a sanctuary for real cows.