We have a Jersey cow. When she comes home to be milked in the evening, we fill her trough with hay and oats and let her calf out of his pen to eat with her. The cow that docilely munched her hay suddenly gets aggressive about her meal, using her horns to keep her calf out of her food. He is no longer her son at that moment; he is just another cow stealing her food.

Bosser, the calf, is so oblivious to everything going on around him he frequently gets clocked in the head with the mucking shovel. He doesn't have the sense to move in order to avoid the next shovel-load of manure. All he knows is that he wants to be right in the middle of whatever is happening. We have to run him out of the barn and lock him out so we can clean his stall in peace.

I wish I could say that cows are especially dumb, but I've seen the same bovine behavior in human beings. There are many families that blindly go about individual pursuits, each one living for himself to such an extreme degree he doesn't know “what hit him” when he blunders right into someone else's business. These same people have degrees framed in glass hung over their mahogany desks between bookshelves. It isn't education they lack—it's eyes that see, ears that hear, and a heart that loves.