Cows help find evasive "criminal" in North Carolina

I put criminal in quotes up there because I don't want to get into the fallacy of over-policing because I too believe that this is a very real problem in the United States. I do not know the specifics of the crime committed here but I do know that the guy ran away and this caused a high-speed chase. This sort of thing rarely ends up happening to people who didn't do anything wrong, and I'll just leave it at that. I don't know what this guy did but I do know that he didn't comply with police and while attempting to hide, which he had done so successfully up to this point, some unlikely narcs came to help the police.

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I live in a rather rural area and while we are not a dairy or cattle area, there are cows here and there. I don't know how much experience you have with cows but they are a bunch that for the most part just kind of want you to leave them alone. They are also exceptionally docile even though their immense size certainly makes them capable of hurting humans.

So the story goes like this: Joshua Minton fled the scene from a traffic stop - I don't know what the traffic stop was about - but Minton, who would later be found to be driving on a revoked license, wasn't very interested in letting officers know that this was the case and fled the scene. He drove at high speeds and in North Carolina as well as most states officers are advised to not escalate the situation and simply follow at a reasonable speed and use their radios and superior numbers to attempt to track and relocate a perp after the fact rather than causing some horrible pileup that injures or takes the lives of innocents. As someone who has been blindsided at an intersection while minding my own business, I can relate to this method of pursuit and why it makes sense.

Anyway, officers knew the general direction that Minton was traveling in and followed it until they came upon his car abandoned near some pastures. When officers arrived they noticed that some cows were making a fuss nearby and someone mooo-ved in to investigate and notices that the fence had been recently crossed over. There wasn't enough clues to make a proper assessment of where Minton might be but then some unlikely narcs kept moo-ing for officers to follow them.

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Those are the actual cows in question. Officers were probably giggling as they followed the cows but lo' and behold the cows actually and directly lead them to where Minton was hiding where he was apprehended without further incident.

Now I can't tell if the police department is being serious or not but their official press release said this

"This opens up all kinds of questions as to the bovines’ role in crime fighting. Honestly, it is something that we have not considered before now."

An absolutely ridiculous thing to say that I hope was meant in jest. I'm pretty sure that while it could be funny to have officer cow in the ranks that the transportation cost of a cow would be a bit higher than the usual K-9 units. I hope they are joking or just looking for media attention because if they are serious, that is just a silly thing to say.

No matter what though, this is a pretty funny way to get busted. Silly cows are working with the police now!