# A cow can climb up stairs... **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [February 23, 2012, 3:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-cow-can-climb-up-stairs/613734 "2012-02-23T15:13:51Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Malacandra](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Malacandra](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malacandra)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2012, 7:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-cow-can-climb-up-stairs/613734/41 "2012-02-24T07:18:13Z")
> [@Blake](#): > > No idea what this means. you seem to be saying that cattle, which lack pads, would be better able to negotiate the terrain than cats, which do. 😕 Emphasis the other way, I think; the idea is that a yielding surface offers more grip to an unguligrade than a non-yielding one, whereas a digitigrade would be happy with either. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Bredin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/96bed5/32.png) [@John\_Bredin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Bredin)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2012, 5:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-cow-can-climb-up-stairs/613734/42 "2012-02-24T17:23:18Z")
> [@Senegoid](#): > > I always thought steers tended to be docile. I thought that was one of the reasons little bulls are made to grow up into steers. Shows what I know. > > However, I saw a cow climb over a fence once. I think it might have been about four feet high. It was in a rodeo arena, during a team penning exhibition. One cow got so freaked out that it climbed out of the arena over the fence. I think it was one of the cows with the number that the announcer called, so the contestants couldn’t pen it obviously. The judges had to break out the rule book to look up what to do about that. I think the conclusion was: that group of contestants got disqualified. Too bad. Then they had to send some cowboys out to round up that cow and bring it back. > > ETA: Wikipedia description of [team penning](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_penning) for you city greenhorns. Having read the basic description of team penning on wikipedia, I’m more confused rather than less. If the cow that freaked out had its number called, then “the contestants couldn’t pen it obviously” doesn’t make sense. By calling that cow’s number, wasn’t that cow thus designated as precisely a cow the contestants could and indeed _should_ be penning. 😕 Or do you mean that the escaped cow was _ **not** _ one of the designated “target” cows? ---
**Author:** ![brainstall](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/35a633/32.png) [@brainstall](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/brainstall)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2012, 5:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-cow-can-climb-up-stairs/613734/43 "2012-02-24T17:43:08Z")
I suspect that the difficulty cows have negotiating stairs has a lot to do with their lack of familiarity with them. Most dogs go up and down stairs easily, but I fostered a GSD adult rescue that had never seen stairs before and she was very unsure and reluctant to use them. Down seemed to be more difficult for her than up. ---
**Author:** ![FlyByNight512](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/82dd89/32.png) [@FlyByNight512](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FlyByNight512)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2012, 7:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-cow-can-climb-up-stairs/613734/44 "2012-02-24T19:20:59Z")
> [@John\_Bredin](#): > > Having read the basic description of team penning on wikipedia, I’m more confused rather than less. If the cow that freaked out had its number called, then “the contestants couldn’t pen it obviously” doesn’t make sense. By calling that cow’s number, wasn’t that cow thus designated as precisely a cow the contestants could and indeed _should_ be penning. 😕 Or do you mean that the escaped cow was _ **not** _ one of the designated “target” cows? Penning isn’t an imitation of rounding up cattle from the range and getting them into a corral, it’s an imitation of all the sorting and shuffling cattle into their correct boxes that happens after they’ve been rounded up. As a sport, penning is done in a large arena with 30 head of cattle milling around. There’s a small pen set up at one end of the arena, the goal is to get the target cows (and no others) into that smaller pen. I think **Senegoid** was saying that the cow climbed the arena fence and was trotting away through the parking lot. It’s the cow equivalent of a foul ball, I suppose, only no-one knew what the rules were to handle it. I always interpreted the original statement to mean ‘it’s easy to get cows to go up stairs, but then you can’t get the #@#% to go back down’, not ‘cows physically can’t walk down a staircase’. ---
**Author:** ![Senegoid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/senegoid/32/6606_2.png) [@Senegoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Senegoid)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2012, 6:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-cow-can-climb-up-stairs/613734/45 "2012-02-25T06:11:29Z")
> [@John\_Bredin](#): > > Having read the basic description of team penning on wikipedia, I’m more confused rather than less. If the cow that freaked out had its number called, then “the contestants couldn’t pen it obviously” doesn’t make sense. By calling that cow’s number, wasn’t that cow thus designated as precisely a cow the contestants could and indeed _should_ be penning. 😕 Or do you mean that the escaped cow was _ **not** _ one of the designated “target” cows? To clarify that a little bit: Perhaps you are confused as to the order in which the events happened: The announcer calls a number (0 to 9) at the beginning of the round. Then the three contestants (who are working as a team, not as opponents) have to chase down the three cows with that number and chase them into a pen. As they were doing this, one of those three “target” cows climbed over the fence and left the arena completely. So there was then no way for the contestants to pen that cow. So they forfeited that round and essentially got disqualified, through no fault of their own. On the other hand, there was another round, with a different team of contestants, where everything broke just right for the players. As the contestants approached the herd, three of the cows broke away from the herd and headed away, toward the pen end of the arena – And they were just the three cows with the “target” number. The contestants got them penned in about 10 seconds. ---
**Author:** ![Alka\_Seltzer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c89c15/32.png) [@Alka\_Seltzer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alka_Seltzer)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2012, 6:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-cow-can-climb-up-stairs/613734/46 "2012-02-25T18:45:20Z")
> [@picunurse](#): > > See the pee pee in the middle? Cows don’t have that. I commend your pee-pee spotting skills, which are surely greater than mine. (Cow can refer to the species as well as sex btw, and often is.) [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-cow-can-climb-up-stairs/613734.md?page=2)