"Walter Riedl...figured the only way to keep his wife safe was to give the gunman the keys to his truck and volunteer to become his hostage."

"The 69-year-old Riedl told Linda, his sweetheart since high school, not to cry, that everything was going to be OK...."

Driving Riedl’s 2004 GMC 2500HD pickup truck — a cattle trailer still attached with a cow inside of it — [James] Kruger drove erratically and acted irrationally as he sought to elude police, Riedl said. Opportunities to escape eluded him.

As they approached Dodgeville on Highway 18, he knew the city’s two traffic lights would give him a chance to jump out.

“First time in my life we got two green lights,” Riedl said.

Still, he never panicked...

Everyone's in love with fluffy cows.

A traditional grooming method, which is just getting noticed.

Loving fluffy cows seems harmless, but some people are always looking for the down side:

Others in the beef industry worry that the focus on "fluffy cows" could backfire. Indeed, some Reddit and Twitter followers responded to photos with comments like, "That's too cute to kill" and "That almost makes me want to become a vegetarian."

"I'll admit, I cringe a little bit when I hear someone comparing these cattle to teddy bears. I do worry that folks will get the wrong idea that these cattle are pets, not livestock," [Matt] Lautner said.

"A man with a cow slurry fetish has admitted threatening..."

"... to kill a family who live at a farm where he has repeatedly rolled naked in animal muck."

"Slurry" is "A mixture of manure or farmyard waste and water; manure in fluid form," according to the OED, which provides these historical examples:

1965 Punch 22 Dec. 932/2 In a modern fattening house..the manure from several hundred swine falls through slatted floors into tanks beneath the building where a daily dose of water soon turns it into a forbidding quantity of evil-smelling slurry.
1970 R. Jeffries Dead Man's Bluff i. 5 He went through from the dairy into the herringbone parlour and stared..at the two days' accumulation of slurry.
1971 Farmers Weekly 19 Mar. 48/4 It takes one man about six minutes a day to clear away the slurry and a bit longer to put out the hay.

Blood donor dogs and cats.

At the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine’s Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital:

To do that, the hospital has its own Animal Blood Bank with a dedicated core [sic] of 12 dogs and 11 cats who serve as regular donors, many of them the animal companions of students or staff members at the UW-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine. “We actually have a waiting list of pets to become new donors,” notes Bach.

The typical canine blood donor is a healthy, larger dog — more than 50 pounds — that has been screened for blood borne parasites and diseases that affect the qualities of blood. Importantly, the dog donor possesses a good nature.

“We don’t sedate the dogs,” explains Bach, who says a typical blood draw from a dog takes about 7 to 10 minutes. “Cats are certainly different than dogs. Cats are a little more reclusive and sometimes have a little higher stress level in the hospital. They are sedated.”

Cats also need a more compatible blood-type cross match when they are getting transfusion.

They also do horse and cow transfusions.

Their most recent resident donor horse, Drive Thru, retired this fall after seven years of donating blood and serving as a calming presence and companion for any skittish equine patients at the hospital. In the hospital’s large animal practice, Drive Thru was a star, getting presents and mail from the children of clients and visitors and occasionally popping his head into the waiting room for peppermint candy, his favorite.

The resident cow donors are Maxine and Natalie, "beautiful and pampered Holsteins." How much blood goes into a cow getting a transfusion? 6 to 12 liters.