There must be carnage in the countryside. That’s the only explanation for a stampede of anxious headlines about the danger of cows. ‘Are these the UK’s most dangerous animals,’ asked the front page of the Guardian this week alongside a picture of a bemused bovine. The Daily Star was at it too: the paper called cows ‘mooing killers’ and quoted a campaign group which suggested that the true number of cow attacks was being wildly underestimated. You’d be forgiven for thinking twice about going for a walk in the British countryside.
So let’s all take a deep breath before turning to the data: between March 2019 and March 2023, cows were responsible for 22 deaths in England, Scotland and Wales, or an average of around five a year.
It’s not been a great few months for cows
These deaths are obviously a tragedy for those concerned, but is this a trend worthy of front page scare stories? If a truly horrifying death toll is what you’re after, then look at how many cows humans kill in the UK each year: 2.8 million. Every 12 months they kill five of us and we kill 2.8 million of them. Perhaps we’re the dangerous ones?
Cows are my favourite animals and I hang out with them all the time in fields and animal sanctuaries. I’m a keen runner and my weekend route always includes a pause to pet some cows in a local field. I’ve never had the slightest problem, and that’s mainly because I know how to behave around cows.
It’s basic common sense: tread calmly and quietly, don’t walk a dog near cows and don’t go near their babies. The calf tip is particularly important and it also highlights how cruel dairy farming is – dairy farmers typically separate calves from their mothers within hours of birth. So it’s no coincidence that a lot of the people hurt by cows are farmers and that cattle are the most common cause of accidental death in the UK agricultural industry. Mothers tend to get upset if you bother or snatch their young.
Other people who get on the wrong side of cows include those who jump fences into their field. The average weight of a cow is around 1,400 pounds, but some bulls weigh nearly twice that. Not everyone who’s been charged by cows was to blame, of course. But it’s a good idea not to wind up animals of this size. You should keep your distance if you can.
It’s not been a great few months for cows. In June, a police car in Surrey rammed one that had escaped from a nearby farm. In August, the BBC noted a surge in the number of cruel beef and dairy ‘megafarms’ which keep cows indoors for their entire lives. This week, it emerged that workers at dairy farms had attacked cows with poles and kicked them.
We could do without a confected media scare campaign like the dog panic of the 1990s. Back then, headlines about ‘dangerous dogs’ led to the Dangerous Dogs Act. That rushed piece of legislation caused all sorts of ridiculous incidents: a pitbull was impounded because its owner removed its muzzle so it could vomit without gagging, and a boxer-collie cross (named Woofie) was sentenced to death for barking at a postman. Fortunately, he was subsequently reprieved.
The Dangerous Dogs Act has become a byword for the folly of political panic. In the clamour for new laws after the July 7, 2005, bombings in London, one Downing Street official said: ‘We’re not rushing anything. We all remember the Dangerous Dogs Act.’
So hopefully we can nip the cow panic in the bud and not listen to a bizarre campaign group called Cows on Walkers Safety (COWS) with its hysterical website shrieking about ‘killer cows’. Let’s not exaggerate the problem. The truth is that cows are kind and beautiful animals. There’s no real trouble with them. Just act sensibly and be kind to them. If you can’t do that, leave them alone.
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