I hear you can lead a cow upstairs, but not down. Did mythbusters ever conquer this one?
may I add a related question?
Is it true that cattle won’t cross a grid of striped lines painted on the road?
Years ago I worked in the rural west, and many roads had "cattle guards " to keep cows from crossing. These were a “bridge” of parallel metal bars set into the asphalt, with spaces in between. They prevent a cow from walking across because it’s feet would slip into the gaps between the bars.
But in some places, instead of building a bridge of metal bars, they just painted white stripes on the asphalt. Somebody told me that the white stripes confuse a cow so it is afraid to walk across them. Seems like a myth to me…
Here’s a previous thread about cow tipping and cows going up/down stairs. Start with post #60 for the stairs discussions. Sounds like a UL.
Right on, thanks, Sam.
I always heard it with a donkey, that you can lead a donkey up a tower but you can’t get it back down again.
OK, I guess it’s time to 'fess up after almost 60 years. Four of us idiots back in college in VT went out one night to the University farm, got a heifer and led her to the dorm. With the old “carrot and stick” (the latter being a couple of brooms), we managed to get the poor thing up a flight of stairs and left her there.
All hell ensued and by morning a crew had been unsuccesful in getting her to go down the stairs. They had to rig a block and tackle with a sling and lower her down the stairwell opening on the side.
Whether this pertains to all cows or just that one (a Holstein) is unknown, but one cow I know would not do it.
That’s all bollocks, speaking from experience of course. Visited the grandfather of a friend of mine, he milked two dairy cattle to keep him busy, and would walk them up and down cement steps to a stall everyday. I’d imagine a poor old heifer caught in the noisy foreign envirnoment of a dorm room would be spooked enough not to want to be led anywhere. If you’ve got a halter on less than house trained cow youll be lucky to pull it towards green grass let alone down stairs where it can’t see where its going. Cattle need to be herded (“Oh, well I’ll just follow Buttercup, she seems clued in”), or spooked. And the white lines thing seems ridiculous. Although, interestingly enough, on an Australian Uncle’s sheep station (350000 acres), there was one gate betwix two large paddocks that sheep would not cross, but cattle would. I was told you could herd hundreds of sheep right up to it but they wouldn’t cross. So they left it open for trucks and bikes and such to pass through.
My cite (courtesy of Terry Pratchett) is that Lord Vetenari successfully brought a goat down from a minaret.
Cows will walk down steps quite happily.
I can only guess that this myth came from a variation on the horse in the tower story. That story stems form the idea that there is insufficient room in the tower to turn a horse around, and horses don’t like walking backwards down stairs. Of course they don’t like walking backwards at all.
But it has nothing to do with walking up or down stairs * forwards*, which both cattle and horses will do quite readily.
No, it’s not a myth.
“Cattle guards” work because they have a high probability of breaking the animal’s leg if they try to cross. Cattle and horses are big animals and if their legs slip between the bars they will very likely snap the leg. That is not just painful but for a wild animal is guaranteed fatal. Cattle and horses also have limited depth perception at close range due to the shape of their heads. As a result they have evolved to avoid any such barriers.
The painted barriers work precisely because the animals have less than perfect eyesight. To them the painted barrier looks enough like the real thing that they won’t try to cross. It just isn’t worth the risk of a broken leg.
It’s ridiculous!
Do you see herds of cows trapped on the tops of hills, because ‘cows can go uphill, but can’t go downhill’? That would make just as much (or as little) sense!
Cows can certainly walk both up and down steps when needed. Many cow barns (like many houses) have a step or two leading up to the door, and cows go up and down those ever day.
But no one would build a barn with a whole flight of stairs for cows to traverse. A cow will not normally go up a flight of stairs; they’d have to be forced (for example, by a gang of drunken frat boys). A cow would be even more reluctant to go down a flight of stairs, they would look steep and dangerous to the cow. They’d have to be forced down them, just like they were forced up them. It’s possible that a lone janitor or two would have a harder time forcing them than a whole gang of drunken frat boys. And the janitors probably would have more concern about the chances of injuring the cow than the drunken frat boys, so they might try something other than forcing the cow down the flight of stairs.
About ‘cattle guards’:
Cows have cloven hooves, meaning they are not a single solid unit, like horses or human feet are. With cattle guards, the cows’ legs do NOT actually slip between the bars; that would be very dangerous and likely to break their leg (which would be a serious financial loss to the farmer).
What normally happens is that the cows’ hoof slips off the bar, one part of the hoof goes on either side of the bar, and the cows’ weight comes down on the conective tissue between the parts of the hoof. Which hurts! Might bruise or even tear the connective tissue, which would give the cow a sore foot for a few days. Cows soon learn that it hurts to try to walk across the cattle guards, so they avoid them. Plus they are herd animals; once the older ones learn to avoid the cattle guards, the younger ones follow them. (Note that with young calves, their legs ARE small enough to slip between the cattle guard rails, and risk breaking their leg. So careful farmers will keep calves in another pen, or put a gate over their cattle guards when the calves are young.)
Once cattle have learned that it hurts to walk on a cattle guard, than they will avoid anything that looks like one (and cows don’t have the greatest vision). So a slab of concrete with painted stripes on it will be avoided by cattle. (But this isn’t all that common. Because in the long term, an actual metal cattle guard is less expensive than pouring a slab of concrete, and re-painting stripes on it every year or so.)
As far as I know, the “cattle guards” that are painted on roads are effective. Horses are also skittish about crossing them. Pigs, on the other hand, will cross a real cattle guard.
My uncle got tired of opening a closing gates so he installed a cattle guard between the pasture and the fields. As he and the crew were admiring their work an old sow came up, looked at the cattle guard and saunted unconcernedly across into a field of oats.
Nonetheless cattle do break their legs on cattle guards. I’ve assisted with several animals injured in this way, and was responsible for one such injury.
The point that I think you are missing is that cattle grids are no more dangerous than barbed wire, which is also dangerous and also potentially represents a serious financial loss. In both cases the animal’s own instinct for avoiding danger overcomes the problem in most cases.
Can we have a reference for this claim please? I just can;t reconcile it with what I know about cows hooves. While cattle so have cloven hooves the actual division is far, far to shallow to enable the foot to straddle a 4 inch steel bar in the way you describe.
Added to that I have to ask how a beast walking across a steel bar manages to get a longitudinal divide to go on either side of the bar.
Can we please have a reference for this claim too. You are saying that cattle won’t avoid cattle grids until after at least some of the herd is injured by the, which is contrary to what every cattleman knows to be true. Even feral cattle that have never seen a road, much less a fence, will avoid grids.
Simply not true.
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Cattle grids are routinely used to control sheep and horses as well as cattle. If size were a factor as you claim then sheep, which are smaller than calves, would be at risk. They are not.
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You can see the scale of a cattle grid here. The rails are spaced 5-6 inches apart. Even a huge Limousin bull will not have hooves 5 inches across. IOW all cattle have legs that are small enough to slip between the rails. regardless of age.
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I have seen literally hundreds of cattle ranches over 4 continents in my career and I have never known a farmer to avoid placing cows and calves or weaners into paddocks with grids or to cover the grids. I have however seen hundreds of paddocks with cows and calves or weaners with grids at all accesses.
Can we please have a reference for this claim that calves are at greater risk from grids? While I have seen several mature cattle injured by grids I have never seen or even heard of a calf being so injured.
There’s a story that they once lead a cow up to the top of the Great Dome at MIT and left it there, and it wouldn’t come down. Of course, I’ve had the same experience with some people atop the Great Dome at MIT. It looks, from the top, as if you’d have a spectacular fall. I can easily beleive that the story is true, like Klondike Geoff’s, but that iot doesn’t prove anything one way or the other about cows having “down genes”, as Pepper Mill (quoting someone else) once put it.
But I’ve made the same argument as t-bonham – if cows couldn’t go downhill, you’d expect to cows traped on hilltops. You don’t, and it would be a rotten survival trait.
One thing I can add to the discussion is that cows really don’t like to walk backwards (to supplement Blake’s statement about horses. I went so far as to ask the folkls at Sturbridge Village, who have plenty of experience driving cows. They say it’s virtually impossible, unless you confine the cows between fences too close together to let the cows tur around. It came up because, according to one source, the infant Hermes stole the cattle of Apollo by making them walk backwards, and reversing his own sandals, so it seemed as if they were going the opposite direction from the way they were realy going. I doubted the truth of the story, and wanted to check it (I think there’s another reason they tell the story, but that, as they say, is another story.)
Don’t know where she heard that, but that line was used in an episode of “Hill Street Blues” ("Domestic Beef) in which a cow (or cows) was upstairs somewhere, and some Black vagrant type said that, “Ain’t got no down genes.”
Bingo! I think that’s where she got it.
A donkey (in Jingo). The Patrician helpfully explained that the key is to find that part of the donkey that really wants to get down.
A reason that old firehouses had spiral staircases, was to prevent the horses that pulled the fire wagons, from climbing the stairs that led to the firehouse sleeping quarters.
You might want to add a smiley to the end of that before someone adds it to a factoid list and it becomes yet another UL.
This is the internet after all, where people will apparently believe anything.
Urban legend. Find me a cite that proves your post.