Family, animal-rights groups find home for orphaned calf

By Sue Major Holmes | The Associated Press

11/28/2008 - 11/29/08

ALBUQUERQUE — Logan the calf left central New Mexico on Friday, bound for Texas in a borrowed trailer to live out his days on a 1,300-acre animal sanctuary.

The trip culminates an effort that began in July to keep the rapidly growing animal out of a slaughterhouse.

Logan — named after the community near where he was born — was orphaned soon after birth in May. Rancher Lonnie Gallegos, 75, who has macular generation, and a 72-year-old friend recovering from knee surgery moved the little red calf to a shed on Gallegos' property to protect him from coyotes. There, they bottle-fed him.

But it was obvious the calf needed room to grow.

Gallegos' daughter, Leona Gallegos of Albuquerque, recalls taking Logan, then about a week and a half old, for walks while visiting her father.

The first was wonderful, she said.

"He was interested in everything and very accommodating. The second day on the walk, forget it. He did not want to return home," she said. "He wanted his freedom. He wanted to walk, and he wanted to explore everything. I don't care if it was an ant. He wanted to get down and smell it, every rock, every stick."

She and her twin sister, Linda Gonzales, decided to move Logan to Gonzales' property near Edgewood when he was about 3 weeks old.

So Gallegos and her husband, Mike Marlow, covered the back seat of their Ford Crown Victoria with blankets and empty feed bags, loaded the 100-pound calf and their teenage nephew into the back seat and drove three hours to Edgewood.

She admits she never thought about using a trailer. "We're city folks," she explained.

Logan traveled just fine, sleeping, hanging his head over the front seat or looking out the window.

Well, there were those four times he did what comes naturally to cows, forcing Marlow to pull over to clean it up.

The calf quickly adopted the four Gonzales children, ages 10 to 16, licking the windows of the family home when he wanted them to come play. He slept on the front porch on a padded, blanketed sofa frame until he got too large.

As he grew to around 300 pounds, he developed his own game — "people tipping."

"When my sister and the children go out to feed him, he likes to butt you in the butt," Gallegos said. She thinks he's trying to do what calves do — stick their noses under their mother's bellies to nurse.

But "he's so big now he just knocks you over," she said.

The sisters have no idea what breed of cow Logan is — and he has no idea he's a cow anyway.

"He thinks he's a big dog," Gallegos said, since he lives with two German shepherds and an Irish wolfhound.

Over the summer, Gallegos and Gonzales began trying to find Logan a permanent home before he reaches his adult size of about 1,500 pounds. The sisters, who grew up with their mother trying to rescue turtles, frogs and other creatures on visits to beaches in Mexico, teamed up with animal rights groups to keep Logan out of a slaughterhouse.

Eventually, Leslie King, community programs manager for Animal Protection of New Mexico, contacted a coalition of animal welfare agencies. A coalition member, Espanola Valley Humane Society board member Marian Sperberg-McQueen, found the Cleveland Amory Black Beauty Ranch in Murchison, Texas, about 90 miles east of Dallas.

The sisters hadn't told their rancher father about the efforts to save Logan.

"He's not going to understand," Gallegos said. "We were like, what are we going to tell dad? He's going to just laugh, his city-dweller daughters."

On Friday, after chasing the now 350-pound calf around for a while, they loaded him into a trailer borrowed for the occasion and started driving to Murchison. They plastered signs on the side of the trailer: "Black Beauty Ranch or Bust."

Gallegos said Marlow told her he can't do anything about the nation's economic woes, "but I can prevent Logan from being hamburger."

"So that's what our Thanksgiving vacation is going to be all about," she said.