It was love at first sight when Jasmine Entz locked eyes with Beef’s scrawny, slimy body covered in straw that had emerged from the womb at the first slip of dawn in August 2017.
“He looked at me and I looked at him and I thought: that one’s cute,” said Entz, of Vulcan County, Alta.
She asked her boss at the dairy farm if she could take the calf home once he was weaned off milk. He said yes.
For reasons she didn’t understand, Entz, 29, had always wanted a steer she could ride.
She had no intention of raising one that would become a global phenomenon, taller than a pickup truck, as heavy as a rhinoceros—her own bovine version of Clifford the Big Red Dog….