Sheep in the City

Recently, police in Milwaukee made an unusual collar when they took a sheep into custody near 23rd and Rogers on the city’s south side. It had been running loose, and the cops tracked the fugitive down before the Milwaukee Area Domestic Animal Control Commission got there. Nobody knows where it came from, so after some impromptu pen-building, animal control gave him a temporary home.

Usually, this is the kind of story that makes the Drink Wisconsinbly Week in Review writing team crack their knuckles and begin spewing flowery prose about the pursuit of the escaped beast, but this time we didn’t have the same enthusiasm.

Regular readers know that we’ve covered unusual critters on the loose in Wisconsin many times before. So often that we don’t have much left to say about it. It’s not that this story about a renegade sheep isn’t fun. It’s a classic fish-out-of-water story, with the part of the fish being played by a barn animal. And there’s the irony of a sheep, who are well known for following, going rogue and blazing its own trail through the concrete jungle.

One detail piqued our curiosity: how quickly he ran away from the cops. That got us wondering how fast sheep can go. Turns out, they can run up to 25 miles per hour!

That sent us down a rabbit hole, searching for the top speeds of other animals found around Dairyland. Goats can run 15 miles per hour. Horses and deer can reach 30. The average dog can go 20 mph, and cats 30. And cows can run 25 miles per hour! Cows!

Humans can run 27 miles per hour. Well, they can if the human in question is Usain Bolt. The average guy tops out at around 15 miles per hour.

This got us imagining an obstacle course race between the animals of Wisconsin. We could ask AI to tell us which would win this contest because that’s what people seem to do now. Instead, we called a farmer we know named Doug and asked for his expert opinion.

As luck would have it, he’d knocked off for the day and was 5/6ths of the way through a six-pack. Doug confidently proclaimed he would win a race with any animal due to the “intimidation factor.” He then reminded us that he ran track in junior high before launching into a diatribe about the “power of his stare.” It was at this point we set the phone down and admitted that asking AI was probably the right thing to do after all.