Andreas Gebert/European Pressphoto Agency

German Farmer Captures a Famous Runaway

Not your ordinary cow: the German runaway Yvonne reunited with her son, right, on Friday.

Yvonne,

the bovine runaway that confounded German authorities and tickled the funny bone of the international press

, was back on the farm on Friday after three months of evading capture in a Bavarian forest.

The cow, who had resisted the emotional pull of a reunion with her progeny and the charms of a studly bull, appeared to have been granted the freedom to roam as she pleased earlier this week, as German authorities officially called off their search for the animal known in the German media as the “Problemkuh” and the “cow who would rather be a deer.”

But the German daily, Bild, did not retract its roughly $15,000 bounty on bringing the cow back alive — a remnant of a short-lived debate between those who wanted to hunt the cow and those who thought shooting and killing livestock inhumane and perhaps a little unsporting — and on Thursday, a sharp-eyed German farmer noticed a stranger looking longingly over a fence at his cows and took action.

“I saw Yvonne on the other side staring at the young cows,” the farmer, Konrad Gutmann, told Britain’s Daily Mail. “She seemed lonely.”

He added: “You could see the stress of the past days and weeks had taken its toll on her.”

According to the report, Mr. Gutmann then managed to herd her onto the field with the other cows where the famously uncooperative Yvonne was tranquilized on Friday and returned to the company of her son Frieslt on an animal sanctuary that bought her to prevent her slaughter.

Mr. Gutmann, has claimed the reward from the paper, which was paid in a suitcase of cash. After all, with so much attention to Yvonne and money at stake, there would be little chance of his being cowed.