And in the meantime, the bodacious bovine has become a social media star and will receive a full pardon ... as soon as they can get her out of the woods.

A spunky cow by the name of Hermien has captured the hearts of freedom lovers everywhere as she remains on the lam in the woods of the northwest Netherlands, elusive to all efforts of capture.

Her break for liberation came as she was being loaded onto a truck heading for the slaughterhouse. No one puts Hermien in a corner, apparently. She hoofed it to the woods, where she has been hiding out since December!

Apparently, she only comes out at night. Understandably, she is not very trusting of humans.

“She has been running free for six weeks now, and you can count on her being very shy, apprehensive about every person that comes close to her,” Bert Hollander of the cow sanctuary, Koeienrusthuis, told the NL Times.

And as it turns out, the three-year-old Limousin cow is the hero we all need right now, as evidenced by the plethora of hashtags peppering social media: #JeSuisHermien, #GoHermien, #HelpHermien, #FreeHermien and #MeKoe (koe is the Dutch word for cow), to name a few.

And all the support hasn’t been for naught. Pieter van Vollenhoven, the son-in-law of former Queen Beatrix, tweeted “we’ve got to save Hermien, let’s all buy her together and give her freedom.” And indeed, the Party for the Animals (PvdD) has launched a crowdfunding campaign that has raised €48,000. They write:

The money will be used to ensure that for the rest of her life, Hermien will be well cared for in cow shelter “De Leemweg”. The shelter is entirely dependent on donations, and adopts and looks after cows from the Netherlands that have escaped from slaughterhouses, cows that have been neglected, or, for whatever reason, have nowhere else to go. In the shelter, cows are allowed to live a quiet and peaceful life until their natural death.



If they can ever get her out of the woods, that is.

See some paparazzi footage below. Beautiful girl, we wish you a long and happy life.

Via Oddity Central