A cow humanised

THE story from AFP, “German cow-on-the-run caught” (The Star, Sept 3), talked about a cow in Bavaria “who escaped from a farm”.

Nowadays, people include animals, particularly pets, more and more in the family, to the extent of giving them human status. But the cow in the newspaper article is a run-of-the-mill farm cow. Since the “who” pronoun was used by an international press agency, it seems that there is universal acceptance of this practice of humanising animals in print.