Owl, I laughed like a drain at that. Hope she wasn't too smelly!
I remember the first time my cat Spook met a cow. She was a fairly young adopted feral when we moved from a brief sojourn in a city, where she had adopted us, out to a farm again. The biggest animal she had seen up to then was a large Alsatian, which she met when it jumped the fence into our front garden and savaged her, so she was nervous of big creatures in general. So first week on the farm, we kept her in the bathroom for a few days, as one does, until she worked out where 'home' was, then let her out.
She spent a few hours carefully exploring the couple of acres of garden around the house, then ventured under the fence out into the surrounding paddocks. This farm had been pretty neglected; a hundred and fifty years before it had been planted to apples, plums and hazelnuts, but it had been empty for the previous decade, and a lot of the trees had died. The surviving hazels had formed big shrubby clumps, and Spook was making her cautious way around one when she turned a corner and came suddenly nose to nose with a cow. A big one.
I was watching her from the front porch and got to see the whole thing. She froze in place, eyes locked on the cow and every bit of fur standing on end. She was a tiny fuzzy grey tabby, so it looked really strange. Then, a fraction of an inch at a time, she started edging backward, away from it, while the cow stared at her in complete bewilderment. Once she was far enough back around the clump she whipped around, streaked back into the bathroom and didn't come out for a week. She eventually got quite blasé about the cattle, but it took her several months.
