Folks in Costa Mesa were served a Saturday brunch of Americana, with an old fashioned cattle drive across city streets lined with pedestrians and filled with motorcycle cops, horsemen, clowns, cows and animal-rights protesters.
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The horses and their riders had come from the Orange County Fairgrounds and continued along Adams Avenue to meet their police escort, stagecoaches and trailers parked outside Orange Coast College at Peppertree Lane.
Anticipation ended with whistles, clouds of dust and parade-like movement of participants as steer that had been kept on the north end of campus were escorted onto Adams, where they barreled west toward Harbor Boulevard. Lookiloos, including the videographer who shot what is below, had to be moved out of the center median lest they be trampled by cows.
If you hang through to the 1:25 mark of the video above, you hear “It's not entertainment” through a megaphone and then see some of the 20 or so animal-rights protesters who accompanied the steer. Some held signs with messages like “Cattle Drives Are Murder,” and all participated in call-and-response chants such as “Animals feel pain …” “… Just like us!”
The route had the drive crossing Harbor, turning down Mesa Verde Drive and making the loop back to Harbor to head south to the fairgrounds. On the senior living complex side of Harbor and Mesa Verde Drive East (which the cattle are seen ambling alongside in the video below), the protesters stood to scold the people watching the spectacle. Their main theme was eating meat is the same as eating pet dogs and cats.
The crowd never warmed up to the protesters, who were greeted with yells of “Go home!,” “Terrorists!” and “If You Ate Meat You Could've Kept Up” as the parade continued past the activists and on to the fairgrounds.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.