Lying in a cow pasture? I know all about it. My favorite cousin lied to me in a cow pasture once. He was about 17 and I was about 9. He squatted down over a fresh cow pie, held his hand over it and said, “Just feel the heat coming off it.” So I held my hand over it, palm down. The SOB then shoved my hand into it.
I love this. Clever man.
When I was a teenager, I would go to camp during the summer (not hugely common in NZ). One of the camps I went to three years running was on a farm. Each year, we would play Wide Games - they would take us for a BBQ about 5-6 km from the base, and then we would set off in groups of 4-5, cross country - hunted by the leaders in cars and torches. We were crossing dairy farmland, and the hunters would use the cows as a detection device - a huddle of curious cows in the corner of a field was a dead giveaway that a group of teenagers were hiding.
The local farmers gave permission for this to happen, but they did not turn off the electric fences. It is pretty hard to see a hotwire (single strand of electrified tape) in the dark, and most people got zapped. You were not allowed to yell, though - that would get you caught.
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Some of my coworkers in the environmental division were treed by cows once. They visited a site as part of an official inspection when the cows in the field started running full bore at them. They ascended a tree and were quickly surrounded. It turns out that the cows were just very hungry. They were only in the field so the owner could get an agricultural exemption on taxes. The field was not sufficiently grassy to feed the cows and the owner was negligent. My coworkers quickly got the county animal protection folks all over the owner and the next day there was hay placed out for the bovines. It helped that one of the treed coworkers was the sister of an animal services exec. Apparently, it is heart wrenching to listen to hungry cows beg for food.
Cow love to investigate novel things in their world.
I once spent a weekend at a friend’s summer home. It was smack in the middle of a cow pasture. The house itself had a fence around it, but you had to park in the pasture part. I was woken by the sound of my car horn. Seems I had left the window down, and a curious cow had put her head in and was pressing on the horn mechanism. All the other cows were around sniffing and licking various parts of the car.
Farmers say you shouldn’t leave a tractor in a cow field with the keys in it because the cows will drive it away.
This leads to the thought of an amusing possibility for a Far Side-like panel, with the cows using all sorts of noise makers and/or crosses/garlic/whathaveyou do drive the tractor away… 
Just had to contribute: my friend’s been trekking around South America for the last couple months (seekingshangrila.com) and a week or so ago he collapsed with a stomach virus in a field 500 miles from nowhere. What woke him up? A giant cow nose snuffling right in his face.
This is weird and creepy - I skimmed this thread a couple days ago, and here I am reading tonight and what do I run into?! It was a little footnote in Mary Roach’s Spook, which is not really a new book at all. So what gives?
If you go out in the pasture and sit very still, they will eventually lick your bare arms and face. They like the salt.
I suppose they’d do that if you are lying down, as well, but I’ve always been a little afraid of getting stepped on, so I sit.
More importantly, when you make an approximate “mooooo” sound and they moo back what are they saying?
The article that was mentioned by the OP was in the Reader’s Digest - which Mary Roach contributes to. I don’t recall checking the author, but I’m willing to bet that she wrote the article in question.
I can tell you from direct experience that this is true. I woke up drunk in a field after a party and had obviously thought it would be a good idea to take a short cut through the field. I woke up and the cows had formed a complete circle around me. I just got up and carried on my journey. Little did I know at the time that these cows were probably going to stamp on me… so dont try it
Zombie cows too.
Welcome to the Dope.
A couple of quotes from a soaring discussion group that I’m part of:
"I landed out in a large pasture. At the near end were several 8 or so cows mostly young heifers. I flew over them and landed in the middle of a 3/4 mile square field and rolled to about 200 feet from the far corner. I got out and called for a ground retrieve and set about to secure the glider in the corner of the field to protect it from any thing that may come by. I was busy for about five minutes or so focused inside the cockpit with my back to the field. When I finally stood up and turned around there were 10 cows equally spaced in a half semicircle exactly the same distance away, about 15 feet, all looking at me with intense curiosity and heads slightly cocked! I thought that Gary (Larson) would have had a great caption under this cartoon. Something to the effect of “Don’t let em go girls, he maybe our only means of escape”!
“The winner of the bovine vs. glider story contest has to be Francois Pin. He landed a PW-5 in a pasture in Florida and after securing the glider and putting the canopy cover on, started to walk out to find a phone. Looked back just in time to see a bull attempting to mate with the PW-5. Stuck both front hooves through the canopy.”
“0400”?! 
Hey, the way I figure it is that, through virtually all of their existence as a species, cows calved all by themselves without any human intervention at all, so why mess with what has proven to work?
Then, with a clear conscience, I would roll over and go back to sleep. 
Because sometimes they need help and, when it’s your livelihood on the line, you want to provide that help to make sure the calf and cow make it through alive.
Because a cow and calf are worth around $2000, and the most common time to lose a cow (or a calf for that matter) is during calving. Birthing troubles aside, they are extremely vulnerable to predators then – coyotes will eat a calf alive while it is half delivered and the cow is helpless. Cows are domestic livestock, not a wild animal, and someone’s livelihood.
Cows, like most livestock, are considerably smarter than given credit for.
Horses are a lot smarter than cows. I once watched a small herd of horses surround a newly parked 4-wheeler in their pasture and experimentally and then with increasing enthusiasm tear the seat cushions out of it and toss them in the air. Luckily it did not belong to me.
Actually, you can tell the difference in their diet.
If the bull is kept inside, and fed grain, while the cows graze on grass in a field, you could tell the difference. But if the cows come in at night and get fed grain, or the bull grazes on grass in his own pasture, you probably can’t tell the difference.
I will ask my brother as he does this regularly. Normally I do not speak to him as he is full of $hit