Feeling Herd
At high noon on an early-spring day in 2017, six steers doomed to die escaped their slaughterhouse and stormed the streets of my city. The escape became a nuisance, then a scene, then a phenomenon. “Man, it was crazy!” one onlooker told the local alt-weekly. “I mean, it was fucking bulls running through the city of St. Louis!”
What seemed at first to be their daring getaway would later be downgraded to a liberatory amble: The steers had merely drifted out of the pen that held them at the Star Packing Company on Cote Brilliante Avenue. One wandered into a residential yard, others into a nearby auto shop’s parking lot, a few onto the grounds of a Catholic nursing home operated by the Little Sisters of the Poor. Sister Gonzague Castro, then mother superior of the facility, remembers the call from the front desk: “There’s cows out the front yard,” a colleague urgently informed her. “They’re trying to get in.”
There before the reverend mother and God, the police (wielding rifles) and the butchers (wielding a cow trailer) managed to corral two of the steers. The third reared up and charged the nursing home’s metal-and-concrete fence, breaking through it and making a second escape. A locally famous photo in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch shows the animal’s neck craning high as his strong head splits the fence bars like twigs. Once again, he’d found freedom.
The brown cow had become a white Bronco: Television cameras and helicopters were on the scene to cover the “breaking moos.” People started rooting for the animal, calling him Chico—“He’s Chico, Chico Suave; he’s suave; he’s smooth!”—as he shrugged off the cops’ attempts to corral him. By evening, after five hours on the run, Chico found himself cornered on the premises of a food-and-beverage-coloring plant. Fate’s hoof had finally come down.
Chico’s new fans descended to support him, and to jeer his eventual capture. Kelly Manno, a local DJ and future TikTok star, pulled a dinosaur costume from her car and fashioned a makeshift protest sign, . The crowd chanted his name, “Free Chico! Free Chico!”
