The cows and their pasture

A farmer was not satisfied with his piece of land. He wanted to have more. He thought: My neighbour has such good fertile land, he will not miss it, if I’ll take strip of it. So, on a moonless pitch-dark night, he took a spade, left his farm, walked to the border of his land, and moved the fence that separated his land and his neighbour’s a few tens of metres. In this way the farmer added a strip to his own terrain. In order to be sure that it was allowed to do so, the farmer asked the cows on his new strip of land what they thought of this change. The cows became afraid, for they saw that there was no going back, because the fence had already been moved behind their backs. Might the farmer not bring them to the butcher? And hoping that this would not happen, they said “moo” and the farmer understood that the cows agreed with the change, or so he thought.
The next morning the farmer’s neighbour woke up early in the morning and he got a shock, for he saw what had happened, and he became very angry. But what to do about it? For his neighbour the robber had not only more cows (for his neighbour had more extensive pastures and meadows), he had also more butchers. Nevertheless the farmer whose land had been stolen said: I am gong to kick that scoundrel off my land. So he went to his friends and asked them to send butchers in order to help him and to send knives as well. However, his friends said: We’ll not send you butchers, for we are afraid that they’ll be killed and that it will make your neighbour angry with us, what we don’t want to happen, but we do have very good knives. Our knives are much better than your neighbour’s knives. His knives are blunt, while ours are sharp, and also the steel of our knives is much better. So it happened that the farmer whose land had been stolen got many knives of very good quality, and his butchers began to chase his neighbour’s butchers away and to put the fence back to where it stood before, for the knives the farmer had received were much better indeed. And the cows mooed again, for they were very happy that the old situation was restored, for they loved their farmer.
The upshot is: Don’t rob your neighbour if your knives aren’t sharp.