It’s just a herd/flocking behavior. It isn’t so much blind, as each bovine is following the one next to them. That means that there are and are not leaders of the pack at the same time. You just need to be able to control the key cows and get them moving in the same direction. Really that’s all that a stampede is. It is “lets all run in the same direction”. If you control the direction, then a stampede is exactly what you want against infantry.
Horses have the same behavior. The only difference is that horses are rarely in a herd the size of a bovine herd.
A bunch of steeds that are only quasi-blind panicked instead of fully blind panicked? Yeah, I’m going to put my money on the other team.
Well, no. The major difference is that horses can be trained to stay in control when there’s cannons going off next to them or gunfire or fiery catapult missiles or arrows whizzing about.
Besides all the other problems, you don’t seem to know what you want out of these poor beasts. In one post, you insist that they be ridden. Then you want to use them in ways completely counter to a mounted steed. You want them to be trained as war mounts but want to throw them away on infantry charges where their immediate death would be the priority for the other side. None of them are very practical uses for cattle in general and aside from “they can gore”, you haven’t even given a good reason to use them.
Armed monkeys riding cows with fricken’ laser beams strapped to their heads. Eliminates all need for human soldiers.
Speaking of cows, war, and the French, there’s this movie. (I’ve no idea why they put the title in Italian; it’s a French movie. Or does it only appear in Italian because I’m in Italy right now?)
As a Canadian who has spent way too much time in the woods, I have to nominate the moose as a cavalry animal. You’ve got the size, the height, the fearless disposition…
Horses have a certain noble cachet; historically speaking it’s been hard to get armies to give up horses even when it made immediate sense to do so. There’s so much history and social class wrapped up in being on the back of a horse that asking an army to trade horses for bovines is just not a realistic thing to expect them to do even if you knew it would work - and the first person to try it wouldn’t know, because it would be wholly experimental.
I know we’re in GQ. But a friend has his own story setting, which has magic elements in it. I have absolutely got to propose a story involving zebra cav, using animal-empathy to get the zebras to cooperate.
Off the top of my head (I am not an animal breeder), I don’t see why cattle couldn’t be bred for speed, agility, and intelligence the same way war horses have been bred.
ETA:
How about using overgrown chimpanzees instead of monkeys, horses instead of cows, repeating rifled firearms instead of FLBs, and train them to aim the weapons instead of simply strapping the weapons to their heads?
Look at your raw materials. Wild horses such as tarpans, Przewalski’s horse and zebras all look(ed) pretty much like horses. Wild bovines such as African water buffalo, yaks, bison, musk oxen, aurochs, etc all look pretty much like cattle. Horses were bred for speed and agility because they were already swift, agile animals. Cattle don’t have that going for them and you’re trying to reverse several traits at once (slow to fast, lumbering to agile, etc) rather than enhancing existing traits.
I don’t know if this has been researched scientifically yet, but the German fiction author Karl May wrote in book 3 of his African triolgy,Im Sudan (In the Sudan) about the Africans there who use oxen to ride on and carry supplies.
(Translation by me)
Later, he has negroes riding into battle - though not armed with cannons or big guns, mostly old-fashioned rifles, so no danger of stampede. He also notes that these oxen are much more intellingent than the bovines he usually knows.
On the one hand, Karl May researched his facts as well as he could by reading reports from explorers (given his time of late 19th century); on the other hand, because he didn’t really visit those countries, he often fell into inaccuriecies.
