[QUOTE=askeptic]
get the airplane/treadmill thread off the front page
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Bump! Bump! Bump!
[QUOTE=Cartooniverse]
It’s quite likely that people have witnessed cases of Bovine Vertigo Dysplasia ( B.V.D.) .
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You need another abbreviation, that one is taken.
http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/VM023
BVD = Bovine Viral Diarrhea.
Oh. Dear me. I think I just threw up into my mouth. Sorry.
:eek:
[QUOTE=mangeorge]
My memory of detail wanes a little on this, but about this time of year and late in the evening (7-8PM) in 1962 or '63 my cousin Sam, a friend, and I, urged on by a few more boys, and just outside Bakersfield-near Wasco CA, pushed hard on the right side of a standing cow. She did indeed stumble and fall over (tip). She wasn’t happy and it didn’t take long for her to get up, and it didn’t take us long to get the hell outta there. She didn’t give chase, but stood there mooing and giving us the evil eye.
We laughed but actually felt kinda bad about it.
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Somehow I missed this post the first time around.
I never said it wasn’t possible to knock a cow over. Anyone who’s ever watched steer wrestling (“bulldogging”) at a rodeo knows that. I’ve personally thrown calves up to 500 pounds for for branding and getting their shots. It is absolutely, unmistakeably possible to knock a cow to the ground.
“Cow tipping” is different. It’s not a group of guys knocking down a cow. If you get enough people, I’m sure you could knock over a bison if it didn’t kill you first. Cow tipping is a single person sneaking up on a cow that’s standing up asleep and giving it a shove to make it fall over. I still maintain that this is urban legend.
I didn’t know the specific rules. 
Because of the limited point of impact exerted by one person, I agree that it would indeed br quite difficult for one person to tip a cow.
I think it important that these cows were at a non-factory family dairy, and were very tame and used to having people (kids) hang around them. Some cows would come over and seek our attention when we showed up at their pasture.
Those funny "happy cow’ commercials in california aren’t that far off the personality of the cows of that time in uncrowded pastures and free to do their own thing which seems to be mostly ruminating, both literally and metaphorically.
Beef cattle are in an entirely different situation. Don’t know much about those unlucky critters. They tend to be, I think, a little psychotic. A feed lot’ll do that to ya.
Oh, don’t assume “feed lot” when you think beef cattle. Mine never ate anything I didn’t grow on my own property (except for vitamin supplements and such). Most of the year, they grazed. In the winter, once they’d cleared the stubble from the alfalfa field, they got hay grown and cut from that very field.
That said, yep, they were a little psychotic.
(the past tense is because I’ve sold them all–too much work when I have two jobs)