A calf was born this yuletide season—but not just any calf. This one has a cross on its head. It was born in Connecticut on the farm of Brad Davis and Megan Johnson. At first, the newborn’s cruciform marking was obscured because his mother Fuzzy had rearranged it by licking the fur on his head. But when the calf dried, his owners beheld the cross and they were amazed. “It was really quite a sight,” Davis told his local newspaper. “The first night that he was here, when we shut the lights out late at night, the only thing you could see in here was that cross showing in the dark. It was really quite a feeling. It made the hair stand up on the back of my neck, actually.” Co-owner Johnson says Moses will never see the inside of a slaughterhouse. “We’re going to make sure he gets a good life and doesn’t get eaten,” she promised.
Over on the opposite side of the cultural chasm, an evolutionary scientist would suggest that Moses is not a sign from God but rather a textbook example of natural selection. Because of a pattern that randomly appeared on the calf’s head, he gets to live to a ripe old age rather than end up as a Big Kahuna Burger, which means the likelihood he’ll one day sire an offspring with a cross on its head is fractionally higher. Each time a similar pattern appears, there’s a chance that cow will likewise be spared the abbatoir and will in turn reproduce, which means, given thousands of years, an entire species of untouchable cows might be roaming the American landscape with crosses on their heads. So is Moses an example of divine intervention or Darwinian science? Let the debate begin.
