Emily (cow)

On November 14, 1995, Emily, a three-year-old heifer weighing , escaped from a slaughterhouse, A. Arena & Sons Inc, in Hopkinton by jumping a gate, minutes before she would have been killed. which made headlines in local newspapers. ==Life at the Peace Abbey==

Although the slaughterhouse set a bargain price of $350 on the cow initially, the cow was later purchased from the slaughterhouse by the Randa family for $1, When Emily was recaptured, she was found to have lost 500 pounds during her 40-day ordeal and was given veterinary treatment. After her recapture, Emily became well known. During her stay at the Peace Abbey, Emily was visited by national and international visitors and soon became a representative of animal rights and vegetarianism. She even served as a bridesmaid in a couple of weddings. People even felt Emily's presence at the abbey and her story resonated with various religious and cultural traditions. Within a year of Emily's arrival at the abbey, she was joined by a calf, a pair of turkeys, a mother goat with her two kids, and three rabbits, all of whom were rescued from slaughter and other inhumane conditions. In 1997, Ellen Little, producer of the 1995 film Richard III, began to work on a film on Emily's story. ==Death and memorial==

Emily suffered from uterine cancer, possibly as a side-effect of rBGH from her days in the dairy farm, and died on March 30, 2003. A week before her death, Emily was visited and blessed by Krishna Bhatta, a local Hindu priest of the Lakshmi Temple in Ashland, Massachusetts, who placed a golden thread around her leg and one through the hole in her ear that once held the number tag when she arrived at the slaughterhouse. Meg and Lewis Randa commissioned artist Lado Goudjabidze to sculpt a life-sized bronze statue of Emily, adorned with a blanket and flowers, Hindu signs of respect, to stand above her grave. The 2,300-pound statue was unveiled on Earth Day. The fiberglass cast used by the sculptor to make Emily's bronze figure is currently on display at the abbey. In 2007, Lewis and Meg Randa compiled the life story of Emily into a 288-page book titled The Story of Emily the Cow: Bovine Bodhisattva, published by AuthorHouse, which collects local and national news coverage on Emily starting from her bid for freedom in 1995 to her death from cancer in 2004. ==References==