Is there any reason a cow would not give milk if turned upside-down? Also, any truth to the rumor that a cow will die if tipped on it’s side or put upside-down? No worries about sharing your bovine knowledge; I don’t intend to apply info I get in this thread.
-wm
oops…<<its side>>
Cecil didn’t mention anything about cows dying from being tipped in his column on the subject. There isn’t a whole lot of hard information there, though.
Cows lie down all the time, and while I’ve never seen or heard of a cow on its back, horses do that all the time.
Milk? I’m guessing that it would be very dangerous to try to milk a cow that you have just dumped on its back, but if you could get to the teats, they’d give milk just as a woman’s do when she’s on her back. It’s a gland, after all, not a water tank.
There is a risk, if you put any ruminant on its back, that it will be unable to eructate the gas from its rumen (the gas usually sits near the opening at the top, and if the cow is on its back that space is covered with fluid, blocking the reflex arc which allows the sphincter to open to let the gas out)… this leads to bloat of the rumen, which compresses important blood vessels and causes death.
The other risk is that some of the liquid rumen contents will make it past the sphincter and be accidentally aspirated into the lungs causing drowing or a fearsome pneumonia, possibly causing death.
These reasons are why vets often do surgery on cattle standing under sedation and local anaesthesia, or why they’re very careful to prop up the head if they have to do a procedure in dorsal recumbancy.
I can see no reason why you couldn’t milk a cow that was lying on its back, but the cow probably wouldn’t enjoy it much.
HHAHAHA, the imagery, the imagery. 