I'm sitting down in my chair in my living room with a hot cup of coffee on Monday morning.
Well, not so much coffee as extremely hot water with Tim Horton's French Vanilla cappuccino powder mixed into it. Eh, it gets the job done.
As I'm settling into my seat and taking those first couple of sips, I just so happen to be looking out the balcony window, and I proceed to see something big, brown, and bovine scuttle across the street onto Semple.
"What the hell...?" I think to myself, and then it registers with me.
A cow.
I just saw a cow waltz over onto Semple Street here in town.
As soon as I saw that, I thought to myself, "Oh, Facebook's gonna have a field day with this one."
Opening up the page, I was found to be correct. A few people had captured photos of the cow and posted them to Outlook's community bulletin board page, and just a few minutes after that, the animal's owner took to the same page, providing a contact number for people to reach her if they saw the cow.
It all ends on a positive note, as Ole Bessie was located and loaded back up before the noon hour approached. It turns out the cow had escaped from the veterinary office over on Railway Avenue and went for a bit of a jaunt around the riverside community this morning.
No word on if she went shopping at Jacq'y Jaye's, picked up some milk at AG Foods or stopped in at Coffee Row over at the Esso. But hey, we certainly hope she enjoyed her tour around town!
It was funny, it was light-hearted, and it was something that is so uniquely Saskatchewan. Only in a small town can you see these humorous slices of life take place, where a cow grabs the attention of many simply by existing in a place where cows are not normally seen.
Without a doubt, there are many other "Insert random animal in a random place" moments that have taken place all over the country.
Toronto's High Park Zoo is no stranger to escapees. In 2015, one of their colourful peacocks fled twice. It roamed the neighbourhood — hopping from one roof to another — before eventually making its way back to the zoo. Many used social media to alert the city as to where the peacock had landed, much like Outlook's recent visitor this week.
In April of 2016, a six-foot-tall emu escaped from a New Brunswick farm. His owner, Mike Sorenson, was able to track the bird down relatively quickly — it went into the woods — but it took another three hours before he was able round it up. Sorenson thinks the bird was scared by something, so much so that it decided to scale the fence and escape its enclosure.
When the emu went missing, Sorenson used social media as a plea for help finding the elusive animal. He kept providing updates on the emu's whereabouts throughout the day, much to the entertainment of his Facebook and Twitter followers.
In late 2015, a woman named Samantha Istance captured a photo of a cheetah wandering along the side of the road near Creston, BC. After the photo circulated, Doug Bos of Discovery Wildlife Park came forward to say that the cheetah's markings suggested it might be a cheetah named Annie Rose, who had spent some time at his Alberta facility.
"I don't know 100 per cent for sure if [it is] the same cheetah," he told CBC News. "But the chances of [it] not being the same cheetah are very unlikely."
In BC, cheetahs are considered a "controlled alien species" and it's illegal to own one without a permit, and conservation officers were sent out to track down the speedy cat.
Now here's something completely different. In December 2023, a kangaroo was spotted in the town of Oshawa, Ontario, where residents thought they were seeing things when the animal was spotted after it had escaped from the Oshawa Zoo and Fun Farm.
The park supervisor at the zoo said the kangaroo was destined for another facility in Quebec. It was supposed to spend that night at the zoo when it somehow escaped its handlers, and it was soon tracked down and transported.
Animals are incredible because they have no idea or concept of the sheer joy they provide people on a daily basis, whether it's as the family pet or a cow that simply decided that Outlook was the place to be on one wintery Monday morning.
Until a horse, a moose, or even a row of waddling ducks decides to visit us here in Outlook next time, I'll be waiting with the coffee on. Well, I'll at least have some more powder ready.
For this week, that's been the Ruttle Report.
