It’s Cow Appreciation Day.
And in the country of Latvia, it was a playwright in the 1970s who helped people appreciate a special type of cow all over again.
This is the story of the blue cows of Latvia.
Yes, they are real, and yes, they’re really blue (except for when they’re young; at that point they’re kind of a beige color).
They’ve been a part of Latvian culture for generations.
The blue cows are winter hardy, they’re considered good luck, and it’s said that if a calf loses its mother, the blue cow will raise it as one of its own.
But they don’t produce as much milk as some better known breeds.
When Latvia was part of the Soviet Union, the powers that be didn’t care if a cow was important to the culture.
Production was what came first.
As a result, the country came close to losing all of its blue cows for good, in favor of the big producing breeds.
But that started to change in the 1970s, when Gunars Priede wrote a play called “The Blue One.”
This massively popular play convinced people that, much like the blue cow, their Latvian identity was something they wanted to keep, no matter what the authorities said.
And that’s what they did.
In 2006 a group of Latvians created the Blue Cow Association to help bring the breed back.
Thanks to those efforts, blue cows went from numbering in the dozens at their lowest point to around 1,500 today.
Which, to the fans of Latvia’s blue cows, is probably moosic to the ears.
Today in 1979 was the infamous Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park in Chicago.
But here’s a lesser known story from that same month: a teenager went to the emergency room in Baltimore, complaining of a painful inflammation in her finger; the technical term is “felon.”
They determined it was probably caused by too much snapping along with disco music, so they named the condition “disco felon.”
Herd the moos? Latvia’s symbolic blue cow back from the brink (Phys.org)
Disco Felon (Weird Universe)
