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Everyone loved Knickers the cow, right? The giant cow – technically a steer but still a cow – that made the Internet go crazy the other day.
Well, if you’re a fan of big cows then we’ve got great news. Because there’s apparently an EVEN BIGGER COW that is making the rounds, and people are equally impressed.
Called Dozer, the cow lives on the Kismet Creek Farm in Hanover, Canada. And while Knickers was an impressive 1.94 meters (6.4 feet) tall, Dozer is even bigger at 1.98 meters (6.5 feet).
Like Knickers, the size of Dozer saved him being sold to an abattoir. "When I first saw him, I was giddy," Karl Schoenrock, who runs the farm with his wife Raelle, told CBC. "He's just so massive. His head is so huge compared to anything I've ever seen before."
The story of Knickers spurred them to share pictures of their own giant cow. Because, of course, why not? Having discovered Dozer actually had an inch on Knickers, they were pretty pleased.
"We were kind of blown away,” Schoenrock said. “Nothing super official, like Guinness official, but that's what we got.”
In a Facebook post, they explained that the “media started calling us” when they measured Dozer to find out his true height. They had previously recorded him as 1.92 meters ( 6.3 feet), but that was two years ago so they remeasured, and he'd bumped up by 2 inches, eclipsing poor old Knickers.
As to why these steers have gotten so big, no one is really sure. But one possibility is that they have simply been allowed to grow. Cows like these are usually sold for meat at the age of just a couple of years, but Knickers was allowed to grow to the age of seven, possibly resulting in his sizeable bulk.
Of course, there was some contention about Knickers. The Washington Post claimed that the cow was not actually that big, and it wasn’t actually a cow, being instead a steer. “This story needs some perspective,” animal breeding expert Aniek Bouwman from Wageningen University in the Netherlands told them.
The Guardian countered back, however. “No lie, Knickers the big cow is actually quite large,” they said. And they noted that bovines of all sexes are referred to as a cow, meaning Knickers wasn’t just a steer.
Sadly for Knickers, a cow though he might be, he has lost his billing as flavor of the week to the slightly chunkier Dozer. But both of them fall short of the record, an Italian ox called Bellino, which measures 2.1 meters (6.8 feet) tall.
