Hey-Diddle, A Fiddle And A Moon-Jumping Cow? NPR Moos Investigates

You know the nursery rhyme:

Modern Farmer magazine, which is currently celebrating "Cow Week," took a good, hard look at the bovine portion of that rhyme. Tyler LeBlanc wrote this expose of sorts, and NPR's Wade Goodwyn asked him whether a cow jumping over the moon is as ridiculous as a cat playing the violin. Here's what he says:

Can cows even jump? Yes, LeBlanc says. "When I first thought about it, I kind of just assumed cows couldn't jump at all — I don't know why, probably just because of their size," he says. "But strangely enough, they can jump. There's one incident I found from some English newspaper where a cow apparently jumped about six feet up onto the roof of a barn."

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Has a cow ever been around the moon? "Not unsurprisingly, they've never sent up a cow."

Could a cow go around the moon? "They have sent a few animals to the moon. The Russians were the first to do it," he says. They sent turtles and worms up in a "biological payload" that traveled around the moon. "Unfortunately they all kind of burnt up on re-entry, but it's not hard to think that you could put a cow in there and send it to the moon, if you wanted to."

Should a cow circle the moon? "I can't say I'm in favor," LeBlanc says — especially if it were to go the way Russia's animal voyage went. "It would be space barbecue."

This is NPR Moos.

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