Raven is our 3-year-old black Dexter cow. We'll get back to her shortly. Kurtis and I had been ordering raw milk from Organic Pastures dairy in California, having it shipped frozen to our Washington address right at the border and hauling it across said border once a week, much to the amusement of the crew at Canada Customs.
For those of you conscientious, citizen's-arrest types about to alert the feds, put the phone down. It's perfectly legal to bring the highly controversial white substance over the border for our own personal consumption, as long as we stay within the daily $20-per-person dairy limit. And we did.
The stuff is liquid gold - healthy, delicious and yes, subversive. What's not to like?
Just the 2-day UPS shipping charges, which usually amounted to more than the cost of the product itself.
Sometime last January, we began tossing around the idea of our own dairy cow. Fresh milk right here at home, with plenty leftover to make cheese, butter and yogurt, and without needing a passport to go pick it up. And even with the cost of winter shelter, hay and other such considerations, she'd pay for herself in no time at all. We have more than enough land to support a heritage breed that thrives on pasture and forage, so we set about locating a suitable beast. She would have to be hardwired for our climate, not require any grain whatsoever, and be tame and gentle enough to milk. We researched different breeds and came up with a few possibilities.
Of course, Kurtis and I being, well, us, decided upon the one breed that spawned the 800-pound, shiny onyx bovine Antichrist we now have in our custody: Dexter. To those of you cattle experts out there who might be wondering what could be so demonic about the typically sweet, docile, user-friendly Irish breed, I say, read on.