Not a cow, but a bull, in the video.
Yahoo answers, a website where any moron can take a guess at the answer, and most do.
No, it isn’t true. And that answer is a load of shit.
Cattle can and do walk up and down stairs all the time with no problems at all. Want photographic proof? No Worries. You’ll note that those animals aren’t being pushed down stairs by people, they are casually strolling down stairs by themselves.
If cows had the sorts of problems that answer suggests, then they would not be able to walk down embankments any more easily than they can walk down stairs. No animals could actually evolve like that, because in the real world it would they would die of thirst, being unable to walk down stream banks to obtain water.
And no, cattle do not have trouble determining just how large a drop each step actually is, and no, that is not why anti-cattle crossing lines work for keeping them contained. Cattle crossing lines work because they produce the illusion of being acattle grid. Grids work because, if the animal were to try to walk over it, it would likely break its leg. It has nothing whatsoever t do with how large the drop is. The cattle know exactly how far the drop is, and they know it’s far` enough to break their leg. If cattle aren’t pre-trained to avoid crossing lines through exposure to grids, the lines don’t work. Even grids don’t work on naive cattle if they fill with dirt. Cattle don’t think much, but they are not blind.
You don’t get camel down from a minaret, you get down from a duck.
On a more serious note, wouldn’t this be a serious evolutionary shortcoming? OK, there aren’t any stairs in nature, but there are hills of various slopes. You’d expect that sometimes, a cow would follow the tasty green grass to the top of a hill, but then find that it’s too steep to come back down, and be trapped.
How can you tell from that angle?
And I posted that before I saw Blake’s answer, there. Yeah, a river bank would be an even better example.
As I’ve noted, cows will go down inclines, provided they’re shallow enough.
You’d think that in nature, cows would be able to cope with steep inclines (goats certainly do), but cows aren’t “in nature” – they’re the result of lots of selective breeding by people that has resulted in that large udder, for one thing. I suspect that the closer to a wild cow you get, the more nimble it would be on slopes. relatively speaking, anyway.
Never mind that, in most places where cattle live the only water naturally available is in streams with steep banks. Cattle would die of thirst long before they had to worry about getting down hills.
It would also mean that every stream would be an insurmountable barrier. Cattle would routinely have to walk miles out of their way just to cross a stream a few inches deep.
It’s an absolutely ludicrous idea.
It’s obvious that cows can go down stairs, but I suspect the legend may have a bit of truth to it. I can see a cow being very reluctant to go down a long, steep flight, with the potential for things to go very badly wrong. I think it would present more of a challenge to a quadruped than a slope of the same steepness, because of the potential to miss steps.
That statement is equally true of humans or rabbits or duck billed playpuses. Basically, if an animal isn’t a tree climber, there will be some incline that is too steep for it to go down.
However, asthis pictureproves, the incline that cattle will willingly negotiate is steeper than a typical set of stairs.
Obviously at some point you can produce an incline that is too steep for cattle to negotiate, but that is about the same point where a human can’t climb without using their hands
At a guess maybe 5% of cattle have an udder larger than that found in their wild ancestors.
I doubt if that is true. Most cattle are already living in in approximately natural environment with plenty of steep inclines to negotiate.
Wait. While it seems to be settled that cows can walk down stairs, are you denying that their physiology makes it difficult for them to do so? An embankment is a different thing than a flight of stairs, in that it’s more of a constant slope. I don’t think anyone is suggesting that a cow can’t walk down a ramp. But stairs introduce a different angle. Looking at the legs of a cow it seems logical that going down stairs would be more difficult/less natural thing for them to do than walking down an embankment or ramp.
In my experience, going downward is more difficult than upward for humans too. When I’m hiking up a slope, I always have to be mindful of the fact that eventually I’ll have to come back down. Then, your center of gravity is more precarious, you’re using a different set of muscles, and your toes might be jammed into your shoes. And as for stairs, I have cartilage problems in my knees, and walking down stairs is much more painful than walking up. Same with my torn achilles tendon a few years ago.
There’s no question that cow anatomy makes it difficult for them to walk down stairs. But before you go A-Ha, you need to realise that human anatomy makes it difficult for humans to walk down stair. And duck-billed platypus anatomy makes it difficult for duck-billed platypodes to walk down stairs. The anatomy of almost any animal that doesn’t climb trees makes it difficult for them to walk down stairs.
The question is not whether cow anatomy makes it difficult for them to walk down stairs. The question is whether cows find significantly harder to walk down stairs than any other randomly selected animal. I see no evidence for that claim being presented here. I’ve spent most of my life working with and around cattle, and I’ve never seen any evidence that they find it particularly hard to walk down stairs. Cattle aren’t the most agile animals in the world, but to the extent that they can walk at all they can walk up and down stairs just fine.
A stream bank is almost never a constant slope. In the real world, stream banks look like this. The slope is not in any sense constant. It’s all over the place, broken by tree roots, fallen logs and rocks and simply by the flow of water.
About the only place a stream bank has a constant slope in on golf courses, where they have been carefully sculpted by humans and get repaired after every storm.
Since we have photographic proof that cattle willingly walk down stairs, I would hope that no one is suggesting that cattle can’t walk down stairs either.
That is almost certainly true WRT ramps, but the same is true of humans. Do you think that justifies a claim that humans can’t walk down stairs?
How do you get Camel down from a duck? And what’s Camel doing on top of duck in the first place? The implications are staggering. What will the babies look like?
Oh, wait… Back to the OP or something like it: Some posts above suggest that it has something to do with the animal’s familiarity with the terrain. I could easily see a cow not wanting to walk down steps if said cow is unaccustomed to walking down steps, but doing so after becoming accustomed. That’s my interpretation of what’s going on in some of those photos posted above.
Try getting a dolphin to swim through an underwater tunnel sometime – even if it’s short and very visibly leads into another nearby open-air tank will full sky light visible ahead. We had two large circular tanks, about 8 feet between them at the closest. We built an open-air channel, about 6 feet wide, connecting them. It took about three weeks before one of the dolphins got bold enough to swim through (and another week before it swam back). During the construction, we had them in another tank at a fisheries research place, where there was a short (about 5 feet long) underwater tunnel connecting to another tank. The dolphins absolutely refused to swim through that – they don’t like to go anywhere that they can’t immediately get to the surface directly above them.
True, but just because different species might be ill-suited to walking down stairs downs mean that each of those species is equally ill-suited to walk down stairs.
I don’t think the claim is that cows have the most difficulty, only that they do have difficulty. I’m sure they’re might be animals that have an equally difficult time, or worse. It seems to me that a combination of their leg anatomy and the absence of pads (like a dog) or a flexible foot (humans) and their size in relation to the size of the steps would make it more difficult for them.
Oh, I didn’t know that. I thought they were all smooth, gradual, and well-tended. 
Seriously though, while I do not question that stream banks like the one you pictured can be negotiated by cows, a cow is not a cat. A big cat would jump/walk off the steepest part of that embankment as easily as stroll down to a more gently sloping area. A cow will seek the more gentle slope. Do you deny that? Adding to my list of reasons above, an embankment also has give, which is especially helpful for a foot/paw that does not have a pad.
Any way, I think we’ve established that cows can, in fact, go down stairs. I’m just not surprised that they would not have an easy time of it.
No one is offering an argument based on any logic that would allow this leap your making. I direct you to my answers up-post.
Very interesting. Thanks for sharing that. But how are they on stairs?
See the pee pee in the middle? Cows don’t have that.
Steers can clear a 6 foot metal gate. I cleared it just a few seconds before.
Never know what you can do until you really really need to.
They just might be able to handle that. :dubious: Almost. It’s unbelievable how shallow the water can be, that they can still move around in. Don’t know about natural mud or sandy bottoms, but our tanks were painted concrete with hard smooth bottom. We drained the tank every Sunday to scrub them. The tank was divided into two sections, a larger one and a smaller one, by a low wall about a foot high. (When full, the tank is about six feet deep or so.) We put the dolphins into whichever sections of the tank we weren’t cleaning at the moment. But they always wanted to climb back and forth over that low wall – it was a game for them. In the larger section, sometimes we had only an inch of water in the bottom, and they’d come over, and they could still scoot themselves around on their bellies. Even more impressive, with only an inch or so of water, they could still climb over the low wall back to the other side. You’d think they were big fat gastropods.
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 for you city greenhorns.
That is true. But the important point for this thread is that it doesn’t mean that they aren’t.
The claim has been made firstly that cows can’t walk down stairs at all, which anybody who knows anything about cattle can tell you is nonsense. And now the claim is being made that cattle find it harder to negotiate stairs than humans do, and that also seems like nonsense to me. I certainly haven’t seen any evidence for.
Well do you have any evidence for that claim? This is GQ. If you have any evidence, then please present it. (Caveat: this of course precludes the use of handrails by either species).
Failing that, can you give me a brief description of your experience with cattle that leads you to believe this.
Not only don’t I deny it, I said it first. If an animal isn’t a tree climber, there will be some incline that is too steep for it to go down. Cats, of course, are tree climbers.
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. 