Too Beefy to Kill: Giant Steer Wins Reprieve

If you're going to be named after women's unmentionables, you'd better be big enough or mean enough to defend yourself. The former is the inadvertent case of Knickers, a Holstein-Friesian steer in Australia who saved himself from the slaughterhouse by simple virtue of being too huge for meat processors to handle, reports the BBC. How big is too big for burgers? The 7-year-old Knickers clocks in at 6 feet, 4 inches tall and some 1.5 tons, notes the AP. "He was always a standout steer from the others, a bit bigger than the rest," says owner Geoff Pearson. But Knickers just kept growing, and by the time Pearson tried to sell him last month, he was just too big. As for the steer's moniker, Pearson explains: "When we first got him, we had a Brahman steer [that] was a friend of his. So his name was bra ... so we [had] bra and knickers. We never thought he would turn into a big knickers." (More steer stories.)