Yvonne the cow now soccer oracle!

COULD a runaway celebrity cow replace the late Paul the oracle octopus as the next animal with the ability to foretell the fortunes of Germany’s national soccer team?

German football fans were delighted that Yvonne the cow’s decision to tip Portugal to beat Germany at the Euro 2012 soccer championship in the Ukrainian city of Lviv early this month turned out to be wrong.

Yvonne shot to fame in Germany last year after she escaped from a farm where she was due to be slaughtered and roamed free around Bavaria for three months, eluding the farmer, hunters, animal activists, Ernst the bull and even her best friend.

Paul, the mystic mollusc, correctly predicted the outcome of all matches involving the German team in the 2010 World Cup, including defeat to Spain in the semi-finals by choosing to eat from one of two containers placed before him.

One container carried the German flag and the other the flag of

The bolting bovine was offered a choice of troughs decked out with national flags on the eve of the Germany-Portugal match and ate from the Portuguese one, according to reports.

However, she also swiftly moved on to the German trough.

Germany won the match 1-0.

Since Paul’s death in 2010 at the age of almost three, a ripe old age in octopus terms, Germany has been scouring the animal kingdom for a worthy successor.

Meanwhile, Yvonne’s escapades in the will provided fodder for a movie, Cow on the Run, to be produced by Munich-based film company Papa Loewe and American film producer Max Howard, whose previous credits include Walt Disney’s The Lion King.

Michael Aufhauser, founder of the Gut Aiderbichl animal sanctuary in southern Germany, which now looks after Yvonne, says the film is going to be “very romantic”.

“Yvonne even falls in love with a buck,” he says of the film which is set to hit the silver screen in 2014.