His best friend is a 1,400-pound cow

The wedding was at Life With Pigs, the animal sanctuary they call home, because they wanted animals around. They had always called Jenna his wing cow, since she was the one who brought them together. So the choice was easy. "Jenna should be his best cow," Mallerie says. Two of their chickens walked down the aisle too.

A horned cow that size can make guests nervous if they don't live with her. "I was convinced she would be great," one of them says, "and she did great." The pigs were the only problem. They rushed up while everyone was trying to give the cow her snacks, which the couple calls a good picture of daily life there.

Jenna's life did not start out this lucky. She was born on a large dairy farm with a twin brother, and when a female calf has a male twin, she usually can't have calves of her own. On a dairy farm, that made her not useful. She had been spray-painted, marked to be removed from the herd.

The dairy farmer's daughter, whose name was also Jenna, talked her dad into letting her find the calf a home. She reached out to a friend of theirs, Ryan went down to Durham, North Carolina, and he met Jenna when she was three days old. They have been best friends ever since.

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Mallerie was living in Arizona and following the sanctuary on Facebook. The two became friends, then fell in love, and she moved out to join him. Ryan says anyone but Mallerie would be terribly jealous of him and Jenna. Jenna, after all, is "a daddy's girl for sure."

The animals live right outside the house, and one of them suspects Jenna wishes she could move in. The first thing Ryan does, as always, is go out on the porch and say hi to her. If he skips her morning hug, she comes to the window and moos until he comes out to give her some attention.

"The cows are always watching," they like to say. Walk through the house at night and there may be a cow's face in the dark window, staring in. There is even a carrot drive-through window, and both panes had to come out because the cows' horns no longer fit. They haven't tested the window warranty yet.

Ryan was told early on never to grab a cow by the head or horns, because to a cow that means a fight. Jenna didn't get the message. Her favorite thing is to press her head against him and go right into a hug. "I've got a knucklehead for a best friend," he says. He thinks she is pretty sure she is a human who just hangs out with the cows.

One of them spent most nights sleeping in the barn with her, under a blanket. When the couple came home from their honeymoon, they ran straight out to hug the cows. As they put it, sometimes with Jenna you just have to be prepared to be a headrest.