So far only a few engineering students have succeeded in milking the cows via some kind of bovine ESP. The art and architecture students are failing miserably, which isn’t surprising (not that it was necessarily expected, either). I got called into the dean’s office to discuss the situation at hand. It’s clear to me that the reprimanding nature of my latest post regarding the cooper cows has made them quite nervous. The institution is on thin ice after the results of the survey were published— i.e. very little practical know-how amongst students across all schools. Anyways, the dean explained that, at best, the cows are meant to engage a “primal instinct” in us or some kind of “agricultural sensibility” at the very least. The hope, apparently, is that the cows’ appearance at school will motivate us to understand how to keep a living thing living: we groom them, feed them, pick up their shit, lead them patiently out of the aisles when they get stuck. What is interesting about this to me (and I said this to the dean) is that this proposition so easily conflates practicality and instinct. Do you imagine practicality as instinct which has been acted upon by the passage of time? Did evolution and developing technologies intervene on instinct to create practicality? The dean told me that I should try being less pretentious in general. I asked him then if the cows might help with that and he said no, I’d have to go to a real farm.