Holy cow! Brianna is a new mom!
The cow that avoided the slaughterhouse by jumping off a truck in New Jersey is over the moon at her new home, the Skylands Animal Sanctuary Rescue, where she gave birth to a female calf Saturday.
“Brianna is now the proud mother of a beautiful baby girl named, Winter,” sanctuary founder Mike Stura wrote on Facebook. “You can hear my voice change when I say ‘Hi baby,’ that is because I saw Winter open her eyes for the first time and look right at me.”
The black-and-white Holstein made headlines Thursday when she hoofed it along Route 80 after escaping from the truck as it headed to a Paterson slaughterhouse.
After she was corralled by police and animal control workers, Stura and his crew made a bovine intervention — taking Brianna to his sanctuary in Wantage, NJ, where she got a new lease on life.
Stura said he was worried about how Brianna’s injuries, albeit minor, would affect her pregnancy. But Winter, who was born at 1:30 p.m. Saturday, is perfectly healthy, he told NJ.com.
“The calf is beautiful,” he told the news outlet. “And she’ll never be without her mother.”
On Facebook, he described the moo year’s miracle.
“She was less than ten minutes away from that slaughterhouse when she flew out of the truck,” Stura said about Brianna.
“She’s never had freedom, she’d been impregnated about nine months ago, and had already lost her home and her family, but that wasn’t enough, EVERYTHING was about to be stolen from her, her beautiful baby, and her life.”
Stura, who took in Freddie the cow after it escaped a Queens slaughterhouse in 2016, said Brianna’s story also spurred someone in Reykjavik, Iceland, to make a donation to his sanctuary.
“If you’ve never met a cow, they’re unbelievable,” Stura told NJ.com. “They have really big personalities.”