Queen of the cows

For anyone who may be inclined to believe otherwise, it may be useful to remember that Switzerland is vastly farm country.  A couple "big" cities (that would qualify only as towns in many other countries), loads of small villages, acres of land busting with produce, green rolling hills, unimaginably wild mountains ... all of which are incessently tinged with the soothing-to-some downright-obnoxious-to-others sounds of church bells and bells hung on the necks of goats and cows.   When you think of Switzerland this way, it suddenly doesn't seem so strange that cow fighting could just about be classified as the national pasttime in the mountain regions.

Of course, one can't be in Switzerland without coming to know these national pasttimes, so last weekend we tagged along with a photographer friend (see his pictures here, they're great!) who was planning on doing an exposee of the event.  So it was that WE WOKE UP EARLIER THAN WE EVEN WOULD ON A WORK DAY AND WERE ON A TRAIN AT 7AM ON A SUNDAY TO GO AND LOOK AT COWS.  That's about when we realized we were crazy.

Then again, it wasn't just any cow fight we were attending, it was the CHAMPIONSHIP round of the Combat des Reines ... the Queen's Competition.  From what we can gather from the history of it, story goes that the farmers used to argue about who's cow should lead the pack up to the Alps when they "migrate" up to (or down from) the Alps in the summer (of fall, respectively).  Competition apparently got the best of them, so they decided to set the cows head to head (literally) to see who is the real queen.

Nothing even remotely similar to the bloody - deadly - Spanish bull fights, the Combat des Reines is held in good Swiss fashion ... extremely orderly, extremely polite and never flaunting the winners.  To sum it up, a bunch of cows bearing swiss cow bells and giant numbers on their bellies are all led into the arena and set free to pick their battle.  Generally about half aren't the least bit interested in fighting, a quarter have to be dragged into fighting position by the "keepers of the arena" and the other quarter go straight at it ... meaning they put their head down and head butt another one - sometime for ages - until one or the other gives up and runs away ... the loser.

In the meantime, the crowds look on ... practically silent.  No cheering, no clapping, no whistling ... an occassional collective gasp or "oooo" yes, but really nothing until perhaps the very end of the championship round when the face of the winning farmer beams with joy as he calls his even more estatic wife and sons over to be in the winning cow with the mandatory flower crown photo session.

Don't get me wrong, it was most definitely something worth seeing, but we certainly could have slept another couple of hours.  In fact, I think my bum - after sitting on a cliff of a hill for seven hours straight - would have thanked me.  Quite frankly though, we've just about deemed it the Swiss equivalent of American baseball:  quiet, relatively uneventful, and much more of an excuse to try a different food every inning and BS with the amigos.  And of course heaven forbid we forget yet another fine example of Swiss efficiency... no "refreshment men" carrying heaving coolers or awkward carriers around their necks ... here they just bring out the backhoe, fill the "scoopers" with ice and drinks and "voila" drinks delivered while you silently cheer on "Tina", the reining 2008 Queen of the Cows.