KO

I love being a rancher because every day is different. Sometimes it means patching fence and fixing water-lines.  Sometimes it means working in the office all day.  Sometime, a lot of the time, it is peaceful and beautiful.  Sometimes it's a little like going to war.  Last Monday was the war-zone.  I got knocked unconscious by a seriously enraged cow while trying, stupidly, to keep her from damaging my ultra-sound equipment.  She hooked my leg with her head, and sent me flying to hit the back of my head on the concrete floor and gash my chin on something. There was blackness, and then golden stars, and the roar of the generator as I struggled up out of the dark knowing that I had to get up off the floor and behind the generator where she would not likely want to come to finish me off.  I couldn't see but I could hear and I knew where I needed to go and somehow I got there, climbing onto a bench where at least I would not be as easy for her to see me.  And that felt like all I could do.  I was barely conscious, dizzy, weak, nauseous, helpless. It was humiliating the way being beaten and broken, even if only temporarily, is always humiliating.
Luckily she left the area as I clung, terrified, to my perch - the rest of the crew got her away, vowing to make hamburger of her at the earliest opportunity.  I'm in complete agreement on that plan.
Since then I've been in pain almost continuously, except when asleep.  Raging post-concussion headaches have made it painful just to have a short conversation and impossible to read or write.  My world contracted to one desire - to find even a momentary respite from the pain.   Today I'm  feeling better, life will go on, get back to normal,  but I'm not so stubborn that I don't recognize it as a turning point.  I'll have to change my risk exposure permanently. Just a bit anyway.
Now some persons might say: well, I don't think you're a very sincere animist animal-lover what with wishing that cow to become hamburger at the earliest opportunity.  And I would say that I don't see the contradiction.  Me and that cow, we're about equal in vengeful spite.