I used to brand cattle that were kept on huge patches of leased land in eastern Oregon. These were pretty wild cattle and would only see people a twice a year. You didn’t want to turn your back to them but they were basically harmless. A look would stop them in their tracks, take a step toward them with your hands raised and they pushing back to get the heck out of there. It can be a bit spooky when you’re cutting the nuts off one of their kids, but they aren’t going to attack you. I never tried running from them but it doesn’t sound like a good idea.
I was hiking in a national forest in Montana with my girlfriend-at-the-time when, rather all-of-the-sudden, we noticed there were a dozen or so cows around. This wasn’t deep, dark forest by any stretch, but it wasn’t grassland either, and the cows seemed to be nibbling on various bushes, which mildly surprised me. They also seemed to be very interested in the nearby stream, which didn’t surprise me in the slightest. And they didn’t seem to care at all about the humans suddenly in their vicinity.
They all had tags attached to their ears, which made me hypothesize that local ranchers probably just let their cows go where they want during the summer, grow a fair bit, then (somehow) find them and round them up in the fall and sell them off to CAFOs.
I was driving from Moab, UT up to Yellowstone and took this meandering back road that went through miles of range land and there were signs posted all over warning that there could be cattle on the road since it was completely unfenced. They weren’t kidding either–you had to drive very alertly because sometimes you’d come around a bend and find fifty or so wandering damage meat clumps blocking the road. They’ll move eventually if you don’t spook them and you can usually just idle right on through the roadblock. That was fun, but it was REALLY amazing having the same thing happen with herds of bison. Those suckers are HUGE.
You’ll pray for death… you’ll be all “Cow-gun, take me away…”
My son got badly licked by a cow in a petting zoo. It took him over 15 minutes to stop giggling.
“Don’t kid yourself Jimmy, if a cow ever got the chance he’d eat you and everyone you cared about!”
-Troy McClure
I can tell you never hung out on the Cecil Adams Usenet group. “cow-orkers” is a long standing meme over there after some hapless newbie posted it.
Dennis
I once feed some whole, dried ears of corn to some cows. They loved it but one got the entire ear stuck sideways in its mouth. We high-tailed it out of there, I was sure it was going to die from choking.
Dennis
I never remember: border collies have “the eye” to lock onto a particular herd animal and then have its way with it. Are those cattle or sheep?
Sweet little corgis are great cattle herders, flattening to avoid kicks while nipping at their heel. I always think about how incredible they are as working dogs when everybody goo-goos at the Queen with her charges.
They are bred mostly for sheep, but they get used sometimes for cattle and other animals too.
They’re smart dogs, and they are trained to be quite a bit more subtle than giving a herd animal “the eye” 
It never fails to impress watching a shepherd working with two or three dogs moving a flock around. I’m lucky that that’s something I can see from my house on a regular basis.
Many park lands grant grazing rights to ranchers. You get used to occasionally passing by beef cattle. Funny comment I heard once, while walking by them - “Do you suppose they realize they’re, like, ten times our size?”. Having grown up around a lot of dairy farms I tend not to think of cows as particularly dangerous, although dairy breed bulls supposedly tend to be really mean. Most dairy farmers didn’t keep a bull. We’ve mostly bred the critters for extreme docility for centuries. The ancestral aurochs the modern cow descended from is another story.
Cows are really dangerous. Avoid at all costs.
But Pigs?
Pigs are dangerous.
Don’t break your leg in a pigpen.
Really.
I had that happen to me while hiking. They all lined up across the field (which the trail ran through the middle of). Then 4 on one side of the line ran and flanked me on the other side, forming 2 sides to box me in. I retreated back, across the fields, they advanced as i retreated, back to the fence and over it, which i found another way around.
In my experience, if you are in a field with cows, they will move towards you. If you walk, they’ll all follow you. If you just stand there, they will approach and stand around you at what they consider a safe distance and stare at you. If you move, they will step back a bit.
Cows, yearling bulls and bullocks are not generally aggressive. However, if you have a dog with you, there is a real danger of getting trampled. The advice, as posted above, is to let the dog save itself and not to try to protect it.
Pigs will kill you and eat you. Cows won’t. However, cows with newborn calves can be very aggressive.
Especially if you have a covered swimming pool.
Yeah, I wouldn’t have been surprised if it was a national grassland or even a grassy part of a forest. Wasn’t that what the whole Bundy nonsense was about - him not paying for using public grasslands for grazing? I just didn’t realize a) cows would have much of an interest in landscapes largely consisting of trees and bushes and b) that it was normal to let them roam without any types of enclosures. I guess they’re relatively easy to round up towards the end of the season, but I was mildly surprised…
I read an interview years ago with Michael Eavis - the founder of the Glastonbury Festival, which to this day still takes place on his farm - that in the early 1970s when it was still quite a small affair, they’d park acid casualties on a hay bale in the barn so that they could be soothed by the placid and non-judgemental eyes of a cow that is happy to stare at you.
What …? No. No.
Do you have some kind of minicows over there, or something?
Man, have you every really looked… I MEAN REALLLLLY LOOOOOOKEED at a cow, man they really have it figured out.