Leaping cow crushes car, dies

In Leek, Staffordshire, England, a cow fleeing a farmer managed to jump a roadside fence but landed on the hood of a car. Robert Gould's car suffered dents and a broken wheel, but sadly the cow died. From The Telegraph:

"I had no time to brake and my car veered to the other side of the road.
"I was very lucky that nothing was coming in the opposite direction.
"The police were very nice about everything, although I don't think they could quite believe it either.
"They breath-tested me which came back negative."

"Cow leaps three foot fence and squashes car"

David Pescovitz is Boing Boing's co-editor/managing partner. He's also a research director at Institute for the Future. On Instagram, he's @pesco.

More at Boing Boing

Eurovision 2013: An American in London

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

xzzy

Authorities report that the cow was actually aiming for the moon, but missed.
hassenpfeffer

Was the beef salvaged?

I was once T-boned by a deer on the passenger side. I never saw the damn thing coming. Eight-point buck; the cops had to put five bullets in its head to put it out of its misery, and after confirming that I didn’t want the carcass for venison, they decided to split it amongst themselves.

Ah, Western Pennsyltucky.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  You turned down a freezer-load of free venison?!?
  - jackbird
    
    Car accident venison is frequently (perhaps inevitably) bruised all to hell and back. Yuck. There’s also the matter of convincing the tow truck driver to truss the deer to his towing boom and swing by the butcher on the way to the body shop.
Utenzil

I am reminded of a Firesign Theatre routine “…and there’s hamburger all over the highway…”
http://www.facebook.com/people/Samuel-Thompson/1616498638 Samuel Thompson

Why would this man be given, or consent to a breath test?
- Stonewalker
  
  Exactly my thoughts.
- Bubba73
  
  In the UK it’s an offense to refuse to provide a breath sample .
- http://twitter.com/gordonjcp gordonjcp
  
  Because after an accident all the drivers involved are breath tested. In the UK, driving while drunk is illegal.
  - Stonewalker
    
    But this wasn’t an accident. The guy (allegedly) didn’t even violate any vehicle code. A cow just landed on his car. Has nothing to do with the driver or his actions and breathalyzing him is just the police state flexing it’s muscles.
    - rrh
      
      Not an accident? Are you suggesting that it was murder?
  - http://www.facebook.com/people/Samuel-Thompson/1616498638 Samuel Thompson
    
    So all you have to do is be involved in an accident and you are immediately under suspicion of driving while intoxicated? That’s really uncool.
    - Richard_Kirk
      
      I was given a breath test after an accident. Well, not exactly an
      accident, as I drove off the road to avoid someone coming straight at me
      in my lane, and totalled the car. The breath test said zero, as it
      should. They also breath tested the other person. I expect their test said zero too. I don’t think my civil rights were violated. If the other person had been drunk, I would have liked to know. This reeks of troll.
      
      PS:
      Zero breath test I understand. A negative breath test, though? Negative drunkenness? Outside of a Terry Pratchett novel, can you do that?
      - http://www.facebook.com/people/Samuel-Thompson/1616498638 Samuel Thompson
        
        You may think what you like about the odor of my comment, but I too have been in a serious car totaling accident and as there was no evidence to suggest I was drinking I was not breath tested, as it should be. Had I been acting in a manner consistent with intoxication or if there were an open container in my car I suspect the scenario would have played out differently. I don’t think the cops should have any more right to breath test you after an accident than they should to look in your glove box or download the data off your phone. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time does not imply criminal behavior.
valdis

You’re a cop. You arrive at the scene, and the guy’s car has hit a cow, and the guy *swears* it dropped out of nowhere and landed on his car, he didn’t run into it. You gonna tell me you *don’t* suspect “guy is so DUI that he can’t see a frikkin cow standing in the middle of the road”?
catgrin

Also – look at the damage to the vehicle. It’s at the front, not on top of the hood. There is the one fold line, but a cow just standing there would probably fall back at that height.
- http://twitter.com/gordonjcp gordonjcp
  
  Exactly, it doesn’t look like the car landed *on* the car but in front of it. It’s not particularly badly damaged, although I’m surprised that the track rod has popped out leaving the wheel at that angle.
ill lich

“They breath-tested me which came back negative.”

Meaning. . . you’re undead?

(I mean, zombies test “negative” for breath too, right?)
Cowicide

“I was very lucky that nothing was coming in the opposite direction.

Could have been fives more cows coming.
- kktkkr
  
  Somehow I knew I’d find you in the comments…
MDwebguy

I think the newspaper, with its choice of headline, is attempting to imply the cow was overweight and that the animal’s inability to dodge the car was the cause of the mishap.

Bovine obesity is no laughing matter. It afflicts millions of cows, causing them depression, self-esteem issues, and social anxiety. But to suggest that old Bessie was to blame, simply because she was carrying around a few extra pounds of sirloin and chuck roast is not only a rude and hurtful slight, it’s a condemnation of our society’s ridiculous notion of body image.

I hope the paper’s readers will think about that, as they tuck into that next juicy cheeseburger.
http://twitter.com/cyrilthefish dan

Reminds me of this :)
http://www.destructoid.com/the-memory-card-51-the-flying-cow-118045.phtml
GuyInMilwaukee

I think it was more of an attempted murder by the cow. Just another failed hit job by these bovine killers. Disgraced ex-MI5 loonies recruit the cows from the slaughterhouses to perform these horrendous acts. It’s true. I read it on the Internets.
Reminds me more of this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FavUpD_IjVY
hassenpfeffer

It just occurred to me: I thought Mad Cow Disease had been wiped out in Britain…???
http://twitter.com/digitalArtform Joseph Francis

One of my wife’s high school teachers died exactly like this years ago. Except it was a horse landing on his car. Not sure how the horse ended up.
Michael Collins

What makes this news worthy of Boingboing? How many cows are killed by cars in Texas every day?
- penguinchris
  
  The interesting/unusual thing is that the cow apparently flew through the air and landed on the car hood, though as others have noted, I suspect that’s a bit of an exaggeration.
- Little John
  
  Your comment implies that you think David’s not allowed to find this story unusual enough to be interesting, presumably because you think the number of automobile – cow fatality collisions per day in Texas amount to more than zero. I mean: Armadillos, sure, dozens, probably; but cows?
  
  How many cows do you think lose against Texas autos every day? And do you have a source? (Texas Department of Bovine Safety?)
- MDwebguy
  
  Probably about the same number of cars killed by cows in Texas, each day.
KBert

Like this (Isle of Wight):
http://j-walkblog.com/images/fallingcowsign.jpg
or as seen in Dingle,Ireland:
http://photos.travellerspoint.com/258721/IMG_2827-1.jpg
http://www.jimdraws.com Thorzdad

I’m curious…Is this sort of thing…large animal intersecting with a vehicle…such a rarity in the UK as be news? The only reason I ask is that, where I live, it’s unusual to NOT see the remains of a large-animal/vehicle event scattered on the side of the road. In our case, it’s usually a deer, but the effect is the same…dead animal, crunched vehicle.
SerfCity

How come the cops never test the cows, deers, horses etc to see if they have been drinking(eating fermented berries)? It’s not unusual for animals to get intoxicated hell they do it every chance they get as evidenced by those mice that became cocaine addicts in some gov’t funded laboratory experiment. Intoxication is the 2nd most powerful force after thirst in mammals so it’s definitely possible the cow was drunk or high on pyslocilibin mushrooms and out for a beer run or sumting to that effect. They’re not all innocent creatures chewing grass all day some of them are hard core partyers and a menace on our roadways.
- Mister Juju
  
  YOUR IDEAS ARE INTRIGUING AND I’D LIKE TO SUBSCRIBE TO YOUR NEWSLETTER
http://www.facebook.com/bazimmerman Brad Zimmerman

That’s not just any ol’ car, it’s a Citroën C5. Seriously, though, for hitting a cow it looks to be still in very good condition.
thomas3645

The Far Side meets The Onion
Beanolini

Almost exactly the same thing happened to me three years ago, involving a horse rather than a cow. My car looked a lot worse than this one, but the horse just got up and ran away.
http://kutsuwamushi.livejournal.com/ kutsuwamushi

My parents ran into a cow with their SUV a few years ago. The cow exploded. The SUV did not explode, but looked a lot worse than the car in the photo does.

(To this day, my mother won’t eat hamburger.)

I’m also surprised that this is apparently rare enough to be interesting news, but maybe it’s the fact that the guy claims the cow leaped onto his car (rather than just running in front of it) that makes it amusing. My parents’ cow encounter wasn’t interesting enough to even be local news around here, even after the farmer tried to get them to reimburse him for the cow.