Owner of escaped Manorville cow calls in Strong Island Animal Rescue group

Hey, diddle, diddle,

The cat and the fiddle,

The cow jumped over the… fence at a farm in Manorville last month and has been on the lam ever since.

Now the owner, Luigi Zollo, has enlisted Frankie Floridia, of the Strong Island Animal Rescue group, to help find the cow. Zollo has promised to donate her to a sanctuary in New Jersey if she’s found.

“She just jumped over a fence, a 6-foot fence, and she got out,” Zollo said Saturday in an interview.

He said of Floridia: “I got in touch with him, and I told him, help find the cow because we had no word or sighting on it. The more eyes, the better. Once this gets found, I’m gonna send ’er out to Jersey, I’m gonna donate her to a sanctuary.”

To find and lure the cow, which Zollo said is named “Viviana or Vivian,” Floridia is using special food, cameras, motion-detecting video equipment for the woods and other means, he said.

Floridia said he wants the cow to be “captured safely and have a great life for the rest of its life.”

The cow is to be wrangled by Mike Stura of Skylands Animal Sanctuary & Rescue in Wantage, New Jersey, where she will live with hundreds of other animals.

Zollo, whose farm, on Wading River Road, has livestock for petting zoos and slaughter, said the escape happened Aug. 27.

“We were about to corral her, but she got away from us and she busted through the fence,” he said.

The wayward cow isn’t the first bovine to escape out East.

On July 20, 2021, a steer later named Barney the Bull fled imminent slaughter in the Mastic-Moriches area before being captured about two months later with the help of Floridia and Stura. He was sent out to pasture at the sanctuary. 

Back in Manorville, Zollo hasn't been moo-ved to panic.

“It’s not really a big deal,” he said. “It’s just, she got loose, and she ran away a few weeks ago.”

By Matthew Chayes

matthew.chayes@newsday.comchayesmatthew

Matthew Chayes, a Newsday reporter since 2007, covers New York City.