Merry christmas. I have a little cow for you.
Dear Santa, I’ve been so good this year. Could you please bring me a miniature cow? I promise to take excellent care of it. Please, please, please!
Although it may sound ridiculous, miniature cows have become a sought-after Christmas gift in recent years.
“I just picked one up this morning,” Allie Sine, a rancher in Wright City, Missouri, said Thursday.
The animal, a brown micro-heifer, cost $10,000 and was headed elsewhere in Missouri as a surprise Christmas gift for a three-year-old girl. It was one of more than 15 miniature cows that Ms Sine, 27, said she had sold over the festive period.
“It really gets more fun at Christmas,” she said. “Usually the woman already wants one and the man approaches.”
The popularity of mini cows can be attributed, at least in part, to TikTok, where videos of the creatures have earned millions of views. Mrs. Sine, passing by @minimooos on the platform, has 742,000 followers.
Once you watch one of her videos, it’s easy to understand why the animals have become highly sought after. Miniature cows are cute and fluffy. They look like someone pointed a shrink ray at a regular cow and shot it.
“They look like golden retriever dogs,” Ms Sine said. “You can just walk out and love them.”
Alyssa Rorah, a 30-year-old rancher from Maquoketa, Iowa, supported that.
“They run around and play with you,” said Ms. Rorah, who also has a doll TikTok account dedicated to little cows. “I get videos all the time from families where their kids are running around in the backyard and their cows are playing with the kids.”
The smallest cows, classified as microminiatures, are less than 36 centimeters tall at full maturity, while a miniature can be as tall as 42 centimeters. They are about a third the size of a standard cow and are still quite hefty. A miniature cow can range from 500 to 650 pounds, Ms. Sine said, and can live up to 20 years.
Despite their cuteness and dog-like mannerisms, they are not meant to be kept indoors.
“I’ve seen some very popular people on TikTok keeping them in their house and other things that are not realistic,” Ms Rorah said. She suggested that some people would only portray them as indoor pets on their social media accounts. “In reality,” she continued, “having your cow in your home every day is not what it looks like. I find that misleading.”
Mrs. Sine noted a morning routine video posted by a cow fluencer that showed a woman waking up and giving a kiss to the little cow in the small cage next to her bed.
“I couldn’t imagine the smell,” Ms. Sine said.
(In fairness, the cow’s owner explains in the video caption that she was filming the baby cow’s last day indoors before it went to its permanent home in the barn.)
Ms Sine said she was very picky about who could buy one of her cows, which range in price from $8,000 to $20,000. She gently removes people by asking them how many hectares of land they have and if they have any other livestock.
“We get a lot of people reaching out and saying, ‘Well, we just have a dog.’” Ms. Sine said. “To them we just say ‘No.’”
The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals recommends giving pets only to people who have expressed an interest in caring for them and urges potential buyers of miniature cows to think ahead. “There are fewer facilities where they can be admitted if they do not fit the recipient’s lifestyle,” an ASPCA spokesperson said.
Still, the popularity of little cows, at least on TikTok, continues to grow.
In a recent one video, comedian Ashley Gutermuth warned people against being misled by social media’s rosy portrayal of what it means for the average suburbanite to share a home with a small cow: “You can’t have a micro cow,” says the comedian . “You can not have an indoor cow. You live in a dead end street!”