If you’ve walked past the Grad House recently and caught sight of a full-sized Holstein cow lounging near the entrance, don’t worry—you’re not hallucinating from too much coffee. That’s Siegler, our newest and most eye-catching honorary resident.

Back in February, Marcel O’Gorman—professor of English and director of the University of Waterloo’s Critical Media Lab—reached out with an unusual offer. The Lab was moving from its downtown Communitech location back to the Fine Arts Building, and among the artifacts that wouldn’t quite fit in the new space was a striking, life-sized robotic cow, originally gifted by Lely Robotics. Rather than see the installation go into storage, O’Gorman thought it might find a more fitting home at the Grad House.

And he was right. Siegler was walked over by a few of O’Gorman’s students and has been standing proudly ever since, an unlikely yet oddly charming figure in our everyday environment. Initially, he was meant to be an April Fool’s surprise for Cam, our Grad House manager—but, in classic April Fool’s fashion, the timing didn’t quite work out as Cam had already left for the day by the time Siegler arrived.

But why a cow? And why this cow?

To understand Siegler’s symbolic weight, you need to know a bit about Teat Tweet, the project that inspired the cow’s creation. As part of a collaboration with dairy farmer Chris Vandenberg of Buttermine Farms in Brant, Ontario, the Critical Media Lab team—including O’Gorman, Ron Broglio, and Pouya Emami—developed a Twitter-based application designed to give voice to dairy cows in a highly automated environment.

Vandenberg’s farm uses a Voluntary Milking System (VMS), where cows wear RFID tags that allow them to “choose” when they want to be milked by a robotic arm. This system is efficient, but it also alters the traditional rhythms of farm life and changes the farmer’s role from caretaker to data manager. In response, the Teat Tweet project set out to “re-introduce intimacy” between farmer and animal, and to raise public awareness about the way automation mediates human-animal relationships.

The team profiled twelve cows, gave each one a digital “voice,” and used data from the VMS to generate real-time tweets about their lives—sometimes mixing in lines of Virgilian poetry just cause they could. Reading about it now, the project was hilarious but also clever. I personally thought it was a very creative and insightful way to bring personality back into automated agriculture.

Siegler, then, is more than just a quirky lawn ornament. He’s a physical reminder of the questions that Teat Tweet asked about automation, depersonalization, and how those affect how we interact with the living systems behind our food. So, the next time you pass by the Grad House and spot Siegler standing there, take a moment to appreciate the story behind him. He’s not just a cow—he’s a conversation.