Came home yesterday and thought it was REALLY funny. Check it out.
http://www.foreverstudios.com/buff1.png
Officers Improvise to Round Up a Herd of Hairy Escapees
By GARY GATELY
Published: April 27, 2005
PIKESVILLE, Md., April 26 - You could forgive the police in Baltimore County for feeling more like ranchers than officers on Tuesday morning.
Instead of hunting criminals, they were chasing a herd of bison that escaped from a farm and roamed through several affluent neighborhoods for two hours. The buffalo breakout forced the closing of busy streets and a Baltimore Beltway ramp. People in this suburb frantically dialed 911 and lined the streets to take in the spectacle of the rodeolike roundup by the police.
The makeshift posse, 20 county and state police officers, finally corralled the nine bison inside the fenced tennis court of an upscale apartment complex around 9 a.m.
Acting as suburban cowboys, the resourceful officers employed strategies that are not taught in the police academy. Some positioned their patrol cars to box in the mammoth, hairy beasts. Others linked hands to form a human chain, while a police helicopter hovered overhead, its pilot trying to scare the bison away from the busy Beltway.
“One of the things we expect with this job is to not have any idea what’s coming when you come in for your day at work, so you have to think creatively and think quickly,” said Officer Shawn Vinson, a spokesman for the Baltimore County Police Department. “And you just got to give the officers credit here for knowing what to do when they had to do it.”
When they finally herded the bison into the tennis court after a two-mile chase, the officers resorted to holding plastic orange webbing and lounge chairs from the deck of an adjoining pool to try to guide the animals into a waiting trailer.
But some of the more stubborn bison made it clear that they preferred the tennis court. A few bucked, and one knocked down an officer, who was not injured. Another butted its head against the fence, while one of the uppity ones jumped over the net of the tennis court. It took four hours to get all the bison off the tennis court and into the trailer.
The incident began just before 7 a.m., about the time Elizabeth Caltrider, who has lived in nearby Stevenson for a half-century, opened her door to let out her dog.
“That’s when I saw them crossing the road,” Mrs. Caltrider said. “It was an adventure today, absolutely. I mean, it’s the last thing I expected to see when I opened the door. It seems a like a little bit of the Wild West right here.”
Many commuters use the road by her house to get to the Beltway or an expressway to downtown Baltimore, she said. “We get a lot of traffic through here at 7 in the morning,” she said, "and I thought, ‘Oh, dear, this could be a real problem.’ "
The police shared her concerns, especially when the bison got as close as an eighth of a mile from the busy highway.
“If they got to the Beltway, that would have been a definite accident risk,” Officer Vinson said. “Drivers traveling at high speeds just are not expecting to see bison in the middle of the road.”
Fortunately, he said, nobody was injured, and the bison caused no major property damage.
But they gave their owner one headache too many. Gerald Berg, who raised the bison on his cattle farm in Stevenson, started his day by jumping on an all-terrain vehicle and chasing the escaped animals. Mr. Berg has been raising bison for about eight years, he said, but no more.
By midday, as the last of the bison were being herded into the trailer, Mr. Berg had decided their fate.
“It’s out of hand,” he said. “They’re going to the slaughterhouse, and they’re going to be buffalo burgers.”
but they ARE good, ive had them too… iv also had ostrich burgers, theyre quite good…