Cow goes to new heights to flee bull's advances

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A cow which was not in the mood ambled to the top storey of a Siberian apartment building to escape a bull which was, and had to be led back down by firefighters, authorities said.

The cow was discovered bellowing on the top of a stairwell in the five-storey building in the village of Lesogorsk last month, with the probable cause of the cow's distress an amorous bull at the bottom.

"The bull was very loving and had paid excessive attention to the cow during the summer grazing," the Irkutsk regional branch of Russia's Emergency Situations Ministry said in a statement.

"Trying to escape from him, the cow ran into the building and climbed up to the fifth storey," it said.

It took firefighters about three minutes to get the cow downstairs by roping its horns and pulling, according to the statement, which suggested members of the crowd that gathered should have done the job themselves.

"When we arrived there were dozens of people outside the building. There were members of the local administration, police and many bystanders," it quoted fire station shift chief Yevgeny Smirnov as saying.

"In principle, they could have done without us."

(Reporting By Nastassia Astrasheuskaya; Editing by Steve Gutterman and Michael Roddy)