BERLIN // A cow called Yvonne has gained international fame and won thousands of Facebook friends by escaping slaughter and trotting off into a Bavarian forest where she has been eluding her pursuers for almost three months.
Her resourcefulness and cunning has astounded the police, hunters and animal-rights activists since the six-year-old brown and white cow smashed her way through an 8,000 volt electric fence at a farm near the Alpine village of Aschau and went wandering.
Even the most sophisticated attempts to track her have failed. Last week a helicopter equipped with a heat-seeking camera went on several sorties to comb the forest near the village of Zangberg, 16 kilometres from Aschau, where she is thought to be hiding.
Then activists resorted to a love trap. A towering black ox called Ernst, so good-looking that he was dubbed "the George Clooney among cattle", was brought to the edge of the woods to lure her out.
His sonorous baritone roar echoed around the trees, but Yvonne was either too far away to hear him, or not interested. So Ernst was led away.
Activists also drove Yvonne's sister, Waltraud, and Waltraud's calf, Waldi, to the forest, but they couldn't persuade her either.
An expert tracker has been called in and has been creeping around the woods in stockinged feet to no avail so far. No one has managed to get closer than 200 metres to her before she dashes off.
"Yvonne is the most intelligent cow in the world. It is incredible she has managed to hide for so long," Michael Aufhauser, the head of an animal charity that wants to offer Yvonne sanctuary, said.
"She has even understood what a heat-seeking camera and a helicopter are. When the chopper was over her, she looked up and then dashed back into the forest, and since then, whenever she hears a helicopter she makes for the trees. We'd need X-rays to find her in there."
Yvonne is living on borrowed time. She almost collided with a police car shortly after escaping, prompting authorities to give permission for her to be killed because she was a hazard to traffic. It agreed to suspend the kill order after the public campaign to save her gained momentum. The suspension runs out on August 26. After that, she will be fair game again.
Yvonne has had a chequered life. She worked as a dairy cow on a farm in Austria where she was tethered for months because she was nervous and troublesome. She was sold this year to a farmer in Aschau who planned to fatten her up for slaughter. Her calf, Friesi, was taken away from her in January. He too is to be brought to the forest in a fresh bid to attract her.
German newspapers, desperate for a summer story that does not involve the euro debt crisis, have been devoting blanket coverage to Yvonne, and media around the world have started to follow suit.
Germany's best-selling tabloid, Bild, has put up a reward of €10,000 (Dh52,800) for information leading to her capture.
A farmer's boy, Sepp, 11 years old and keen to supplement his pocket money, contacted the paper after finding a cowpat a few hundred metres from his home.
A vet who inspected Yvonne's droppings concluded that she was healthy. Dr Hans Georg Pflüger, hired by Bild for the task, said: "Yvonne is well fed."
Life on the run seems to become Yvonne. Every attempt to capture her is making her cleverer.
She has her own Facebook page, Save Yvonne the Cow, with 24,000 fans, and a number of hastily composed songs in her honour can be savoured on YouTube, including a Bavarian folk ditty with the verse: "You won't turn me into sausages, I've got a heart just like you."
The hype echoes the furore surrounding Bruno, the first bear to venture into Germany in 170 years, who became a celebrity in 2006 during his six-week rampage around the Alps in which he killed dozens of sheep, raided beehives for honey, and sat on a guinea pig. He was finally shot dead, and is still mourned.
Germany has a penchant for celebrity animals. Knut, the polar bear cub hand-reared in Berlin Zoo, became a star and a symbol of Berlin until his death in March. Heidi, the cute, cross-eyed opossum in Leipzig Zoo, was hired by a US network to help with coverage of this year's Oscar awards ceremony.
And who could forget Paul the Octopus, from an aquarium in the western city of Oberhausen, who correctly predicted the outcome of eight matches during the World Cup in 2010 - a 1 in 256 chance.
Yvonne is fast reaching their level of fame. If she only knew the life that beckons for her, she might abandon her odyssey. Gut Aiderbichl, an animal welfare sanctuary with 16 sites in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and France, has purchased her from the farmer in Aschau and plans to let her live out her days in peace, grazing with her family.
"In one respect, Yvonne has performed a miracle because people are talking about cows now, about how they are transported, how they are slaughtered, and how they are kept," said Mr Aufhauser. "Cattle aren't high up in the animal popularity scale and it hasn't been possible before to address their plight in this way."
Meanwhile, Mr Aufhauser, whose team plans to tranquillise Yvonne and transport her to a sanctuary in Deggendorf, Bavaria, is confident Yvonne will be caught soon.
"This morning the tracker asked us to send some more strong men to help them, and not to call his mobile. They're in hot pursuit."