cow tilting myth | Mental Floss

When it comes to urban legends involving cattle, the cow tilting is perhaps the one that gets milked the most. As these stories unfold, groups of drunken youths sometimes sneak onto farms and sneak past sleepy cows, using brute force to knock them down.

It’s unnecessary, cruel, and luckily for the cow, it’s not really a thing that happens.

Modern Farmer’s cattle-friendly people investigated these claims and found that they were largely unsupported by things one looks for in the justification of stories, such as physics, facts, and history. common sense.

The most glaring evidence against tipping cows is that cows don’t sleep upright. They settle on the stomach. Even then, cows only sleep about two hours a day, as their instinct has taught them that other species find them appetizing and that they should be on guard.

Sneaking around on one is therefore not easy to achieve. And once you’re near a cow, no amount of frat guy beer will produce the force needed to knock down a 1,400-pound animal. Cows, although sometimes appearing as stationary objects, are able to shift their weight and balance to resist such attempts. It can take five or six people to create enough force moving fast enough to catch a cow by surprise and tip it over.

This theory was confirmed by a 2005 report from the Department of Zoology at the University of British Columbia, which used mathematics to determine that it took a small army to move a resistant cow. Tracy Boechler, a student participating in the work, told The Register that “a cow 1.45 meters tall pushed at an angle of 23.4 degrees to the ground would require 2,910 Newtons of force, which is the equivalent of of 4.43 people “. Good luck trying to get several drunk people to do this calculation on a napkin.

This does not mean that it is completely impossible. With enough people, some trick – like tying up a cow’s legs – and maybe a younger, lighter cow, maybe one or two student stuntmen have managed to knock over a cow. But it’s hard enough to think of much of it as fiction.

So why has the myth persisted? Probably because there is an element of humor, even if it is misguided. Knocking down a cow in a drunken stupor has a sort of Other side quality, and sharing a story you’ve heard from a friend of a friend will likely elicit a laugh from someone. But the cows have the last word.

[h/t Smithsonian]