The local council of the Spanish municipality of Siero has handed out several 300 euro fines to local farmers because one of their cows mooed above the allowed decibel limit.
The 300 euro (£261/$293) fine was handed down to local farmers in the municipality after a neighbour complained that one of the cows kept by the farmers was mooing too loudly.
The booming bovine, named Carmina, was just several months old when the loud mooing took place last December, but the fine was not handed down until this week, the Spanish newspaper El Mundo reports.
While the owners of the cow stated that the loud mooing had only gone on for a few days, the neighbour claimed that the noise had gone on for several months. The farmers claimed that the cow had mooed and moaned more than normal but added, “it sounds ridiculous to have to justify the mooing of a cow.”
The police of the town, meanwhile, measured the mooing of the cow and found it to be 74 decibels, far above the maximum limit of 55 decibels allowed by the local government’s noise laws.
Similar stories of odd noise complaints by people unwilling to put up with the normal pattern of life in the countryside have been seen in recent years, including a small town outside of Madrid that considered fining a local church around 16,000 euros in 2016 because the church’s bells were deemed to be too noisy.
The bells of Our Lady of the Assumption Church in Mostoles were found to be around 30 decibels above the 55-decibel limit, the same limit as in Siero.
Just a year later, the bells of St Peter’s in Sandwich, Kent, South East England, which had rung every 15 minutes since 1779, were silenced by the local government following a single noise complaint.
The decision by the Siena local government is also just the latest bizarre government decision regarding cows and comes as New Zealand’s leftist Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and her government proposed taxing cow burps and urination to fight against climate change earlier this month.