One must also take into account that a person walking among cows isn’t the same as a loose dog running through a herd of cows with a person trailing behind.   Dogs are seen as potential predators of cattle or horses, and the cow or horse can react in fear and/or aggression as a result.   It’s sheer ignorance to think it’s safe to let the family dog romp among a herd of strange livestock.    I suppose we have TV to thank for that:  people are taught by TV that sharks and snakes are terrifying.   In reality disease carrying mosquitoes kill more people worldwide than sharks, snakes, and cows combined.   

Why don’t people use more common sense?  Here is a group of half-ton strange animals that you don’t know anything about.  Why not just steer clear of the herd?   Just because something is of a domesticated species doesn’t mean it can’t hurt you.   

I wish the article would address the human’s role in changing how dangerous a herd or a single cow is.    Castrating the bulls, for example, is an easy way to lower the risk factor.   Not all bulls are mean, but steers on average tend to be more docile.  Don’t let bulls run loose where strangers are likely to visit.  Do not breed from aggressive animals, even if it’s a good producer of milk or meat.   And one big thing: *handling*.   Big scale livestock producers touch the animals only to move them, ship them, and kill them.   Handling is aggressive and full of electric cattle prods and fear as a motivator.   As someone who has seen cattle being loaded at the livestock auction, it’s never kind or respectful to the animal.    This perhaps is too tightly woven into the quantity-not-quality factory farming mindset.    As long as cattle are taught to hate people, there will be cattle that hurt people.   Contrast that to the examples of cows who are raised kindly and taught manners, for example those who are taught to accept riding, such as this one:http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/06/cow-german-girl-rides-show-jumps 

The other topic is the supposed need for humans to be in contact with cattle so often.  It’s absolutely untrue that we need cattle to feed the world’s population.  Sure, cattle raising makes some people rich and produces dishes based with beef — but that does not make it necessary.    Other than special grass-fed cattle, all commercially raised beef is fed grains.  It takes 6-10x as many pounds of grain to produce one pound of usable meat from the cow.   Imagine how many people that would feed?  How can we live in a world where human beings starve to death, when there is ample food but it’s being given to cows and pigs instead.   In the US, 70% of all grain/cereals produced aren’t given to people but livestock.   The majority of taxpayer subsidies in the US go to meat/dairy/egg production, while our government’s Dept of Health wants us eating less meat?!   In the US, 28% of greenhouse gasses come not from cars or factories but from livestock.     If everyone in the US skipped meat & dairy just one day a week, it would be like taking 7.6 million cars off the road in terms of pollution.    I don’t care how pretty the Big Ag’s marketing brochures, there is no such thing as sustainable domestic livestock production.

As most human-bites are accidents, you’re most at risk when sitting idly on a surfboard north of San Francisco (great whites feed on sealions there, and the profile is similar when seen from beneath) or when splashing around, even in shallow water.

But with millions of swimmers, snorkelers, surfers and divers in the nation’s oceans annually, 100 incidents isn’t a statistic, it’s an outlier. Drowning is certainly a greater danger: compare to an estimated 388,000 deaths by drowning in 2004, excluding those due to natural disasters.

There can be only moo.

…humans probably spend multiples somewhere in the hundreds more time around cows than sharks.

Why? Most farming in the US is a factory operation. There aren’t crowds of milkmaids in fairy tale costumes interacting with the bovines.

Maggie said in an early post that 108 people get killed by cows in the U.S. year as opposed to 4 by sharks, which makes cows 27 times more dangerous. That’s obviously nonsense, because humans probably spend multiples somewhere in the hundreds more time around cows than sharks.

Only the plankton-feeding whale shark was unconcerned. The fish-eaters flee: you’re not a prey-item, so there’s no point in being near you. Only at a UNESCO site in the Philippines (where diver-numbers are limited) were the sharks curious enough for me to see and photograph them.

They’re skittish, like someone else’s cats. I’ve been within 5 meters of a meter-long shark. They are beautiful fish, but highly aware of your presence and tend to swim off.

I. Do. Have. Photographs.

Excerpt: “Our brains aren’t very good at probability and risk analysis. We tend to exaggerate spectacular, strange and rare events, and downplay ordinary, familiar and common ones. We think rare risks are more common than they are. We fear them more than probability indicates we should.”

Absolutely untrue. 

 ”-and so there’s a romantic idealized view of what is good natural food as opposed to food that’s not and so when people perceive that you are tinkering with the food yes they have outrage and they have rage about this and when you have rage and fear together it’s a very-very dominant cocktail of emotions it’s very hard to turn around, very hard to turn around.”

This sounds like big agribusiness bullshit to me. Along with a healthy dose of implying that those who are fighting against the total control of food production by agribusiness are somehow silly, emotional creatures with no brains. When, in fact, our very survival on this planet depends on figuring out how to keep Monsanto from starving us all to death. 

On a case-by-case basis, you’re in more danger if you’re face to face with a shark than a cow.

You. Don’t. Know. That.

Because for all you know, 95% of the time that there’s a shark within 20 feet of you, you have no idea. Because it’s underwater. And you can’t see it unless it decides to attack you.

I just feel that, rather oddly, these articles are hinting at cows being more dangerous than we think – but are they? Or do we just have so many people around cows that sometimes bad shit happens? Unlike sharks, which people don’t tend to be around, but when they are bad things often happen – hence the fear. I don’t think sharks should be demonised, on the contrary, but I don’t think our fear of them is irrational, or even disproportional.

It’s not really about the inherent danger that the animals present, but our experience with them. We could also pull out some horrific incidences of death by tea-cosy, but it doesn’t mean that our current mental image of fluffy tea-cosies being safe and soft should be shattered. Cows are awesome, and can be super friendly, attentive pets, like big inconvenient dogs.

There’s even the old stat that falling coconuts kill more people than crocodiles. But that doesn’t mean that we should be more fearful of coconuts than crocodiles.

Am I missing the point?

Seeing cows staggering around and occasionally falling over is great fun but trying to round them up and get them out of the orchard is not easy. It basically involves lots of shouting and hitting the cows with sticks. Oddly the cows don’t seem to get more aggressive when they are drunk, just totally uncontrollable and uncoordinated.

I had to rescue a couple of elderly ladies once when I was walking from one village to the next. The women had been herded into a corner of a field by some heifers. The cows were just curious and when the women backed away the cows just followed them and a game of cat and mouse ensued with the women losing out. Again lots of shouting and hitting did the trick.

In other words, there are a heck of a lot more people interacting with a cow at this very moment than there are people who have any chance of being near a shark – in fact there are probably more people farming than swimming in any body of water today.

-abs blames his vegetarian wife, and his love of cooking (because it’s hard to cook meat for your wife knowing she won’t eat it, and cooking two separate meals for one dinner for two people is just Right Out)

-abs will readily admit that “karma” and “seems fair” look synonymous to him

Cattle/livestock grazing is common on public lands: http://www.blm.gov/wo/st/en/prog/grazing.html Well, I don’t know, is 157 million acres that big? I guess that’s how you stop the literal tragedy of the commons- regulate it.

If the cows are in a herd in a field, they probably won’t be interested in you unless you go up and spook them. Single animals separated from the herd are more dangerous, since they feel lonely and vulnerable without close relationships. I know we can all relate.

From what I understand from my farmgirl-friend, cows lower their heads and accelerate until they run you over. That’s how you can tell they are after you.

And I might be more worried about an irate farmer with a shotgun if you’re trespassin’. :-P

They were on the path, and the area was public land. I was riding slow, pedaling, trying not to have my freewheel ratchet and sound like a rattlesnake. The cattle didn’t seem that disturbed, certainly they noticed me and slowly tried to avoid me, but I was within arms reach of them.

What are the warning signs of a cow about to attack?

Even a Bull Shark – trained divers film them without cages. And there’s only a couple of dangerous species of sharks out of hundreds.