Unruly Cows Descend On Upscale Neighborhood Night After Night

People living in a pricey area of San Jose, California, have been dealing with an unexpected problem: nightly onslaughts of cows and bulls tearing up lawns, pooping everywhere and refusing to be shooed off by tactics like sprinklers.

Residents of Whitetail Lane in the neighborhood of Evergreen told The Mercury News earlier this week that the bovines started showing up a couple of months ago and began descending on the area on a near-nightly basis, departing again before dawn.

Some describe the cows as frighteningly bold.

“They ran toward us,” resident Tom Quach told the paper, describing an incident he said involved about six animals. “We turned on the sprinklers, but they just stood there and took a shower.”

Quach added he’s spent hundreds of dollars replacing broken sprinkler heads damaged by the cows.

Residents speaking with various local media outlets also describe the large animals as a traffic hazard, saying they’ve had close calls behind the wheel after a cow surprised them in a road or driveway.

While there are many grazing cows not too far from the neighborhood, it’s been somewhat of a mystery exactly where these particular cows were coming from. Jay Terrado of San Jose Animal Services told NBC Bay Area on Wednesday that the agency has identified a nearby man who believes the delinquent cows may belong to him and that someone has been cutting his fencing.

Terrado told news station KGO that despite the cows reportedly causing problems for the past two months, he only learned about the issue this week.

After reports of the rogue cows hit the media, some local ranchers began taking matters into their own hands to attempt to wrangle some of the animals, according to news station KTVU . It wasn’t immediately clear if there were still any bovines on the loose, and San Jose Animal Services did not immediately return a request for comment from HuffPost.