Cow attacks are no laughing matter

One of the worst things about being attacked by a cow is that no one takes it very seriously afterwards. My partner Claire and I found that out the hard way after a walk in Devon.

We were making our way through a large field on a public footpath, heading towards a herd of cows milling around a stile. Most were ignoring us, but one seemed different – larger and more malevolent than the others. It began to stare intensely at us, and as we carried on, it started to walk slowly in our direction.

Hoping it might be a curious cow, rather than an aggressive one, we branched out to the left to give it a wider berth. But the cow then broke into a full-on run. At this point we froze, thinking it might slow down if we didn’t spook it. Only when it was almost on top of us, showing no sign of stopping, did I crack and scream: ‘RUN!’

The cow ground to a halt, momentarily shocked at the sound of my voice, but then reared up on its hind legs like a stallion and leapt after me as I sprinted away. I had no idea how close it was but Claire said afterwards that the cow had its head down as it charged after me and was only a foot or so from my back. She was terrified I was going to be trampled in front of her eyes.

In the end we were lucky. As we went round a corner it stopped chasing, and we were able to scramble through a hedge to escape. Afterwards we felt extremely fortunate not to have been seriously hurt. But if we were hoping for sympathy after being charged by an animal which weighs some 500kg (about the same as a polar bear), we didn’t find it. My mum, who grew up on a dairy farm, seemed bemused. Most people either blamed us for the attack (‘Were you really on a footpath?’ ‘You must have provoked it’), or simply didn’t believe us. Others looked at us expectantly as if waiting for the punchline of a joke.

Cows are a menace, though, like it or not. Last week 20 of them surrounded and headbutted a woman in Lancashire and left her with 15 broken ribs, a punctured lung and a shattered ankle. The victim had to drag herself to the nearest drystone wall and haul herself over before mountain rescue arrived.

In the aftermath of the attack, a grassroots campaign group called Killer Cows has been given a new lease of life. It was set up by a trio of walkers after two were seriously injured in separate cow attacks. One, a farmer’s daughter, escaped with several broken ribs and had to be pulled from the field, unconscious, by her husband. The other was left with a lacerated liver.

The campaign now collects cow attack stories from walkers and publishes the most serious online, with titles such as ‘Maxine’s story: rammed by a cow’. Dr Ruth Livingstone, a retired GP and one of the founders of the group, tells me that despite the seriousness of the attacks, it’s quite common for cow victims to be met with incredulity, bad puns (‘Why didn’t you moo-ve out of the way?’ is a go-to joke) and blame. The number of people killed by cows may be small – the Health and Safety Executive says that there are on average four or five fatalities in Britain every year – but that reached 11 between 2020 and last year. In comparison, around ten people worldwide are killed by sharks each year, and we don’t laugh about that. And, as Killer Cows points out, the cow attack figures don’t include the many serious injuries and near misses, neither of which are recorded by the HSE.

At the moment there’s little protection for walkers. Farmers are advised to keep any animal which is aggressive away from the public and to take extra care during calving season, but it’s not clear how often this guidance is followed. In February a farmer was given a 12-week suspended sentence after an 83-year-old man was attacked and killed by cows with calves on a public footpath.

Killer Cows wants greater use of electric fences on popular paths near cattle, compulsory liability insurance for farmers and the creation of a cow attack database. Dr Livingstone hopes that a national reporting system will reveal patterns – there’s a theory, for example, that continental breeds are more aggressive than British ones. It also seems that women are more likely to be seriously hurt by a cow – perhaps because they are typically smaller or can’t run as fast. The database could also challenge some cow attack myths. It’s commonly assumed, for example, that cows only really attack walkers with dogs, but Dr Livingstone says that around half of the incidents reported to the group don’t involve one, even if the most serious attacks do.

Controversially, the campaign group also encourages walkers to sue if they are seriously hurt – not to punish farmers, but to encourage them to take out insurance and be more responsible by separating aggressive livestock from public rights of way.

At the moment it feels unlikely that the Killer Cow campaign will have much luck in making public footpaths safe from aggressive cows. It has been some comfort, though, to find people who take cow attacks a little more seriously. And in the meantime I have found my own personal brand of catharsis: enjoying a steak whenever I can.