WATKINS GLEN, N.Y. — As I stood in the midst of enormous Holstein steers leisurely munching hay at a spanking new barn at Farm Sanctuary in upstate New York, I thought about Knickers, the already fading meme of bovine gigantism.

I was surrounded by Knickers knockoffs, or Knickers cousins, or at least other giant Holsteins. It reminded me of an old video game called Diablo, which had a secret cow level. In it, quickly multiplying bipedal Holsteins surrounded and killed your avatar.

That’s about as close as most of us get to Holsteins, which actually walk on all four legs and are very gentle. We all kind of know that, which is why the secret cow level was so weird and disturbing, and perhaps why Gary Larson put them in so many cartoons. That and the guilt so many people feel about their ignorance of the lives of the animals that end up on sesame seed buns.

Not only do we eat them, we know almost nothing about them, which no doubt has something to do with why we eat them. But we don’t even know how big they are anymore.