When the cow is more deadly than the shark

Afortnight ago the shocking news came through that the inventor of a device benefiting hundreds of thousands of people had been trampled to death by a herd of cows on his farm in East Sussex.

Professor Brian Bellhouse was the inventor of PowderJect, an ingenious device that provided needle-free delivery of drugs and vaccines to those with a phobia of needles.

for years now, i have been on the alert for news stories about cows killing people. for some reason, cows have a benign reputation. We think of them as slightly dull, even dim-witted, but essentially friendly. When anything bad happens, it’s the bull that gets the blame.

We have grown so used to the sight of angry bulls charging matadors that whenever we hear of a cow charging a human we assume it must have been a bull. this mistake is underpinned by our memories of children’s comics like the Beano or Beezer. in most issues, you could expect to find a furious bull, circular clouds of steam issuing from its head, chasing a helpless figure of authority across a field.

Meanwhile, Dennis the Menace or roger the Dodger would be sneakily hiding the ‘Beware of the Bull’ sign, the words ‘SNIGGER! SNIGGER!’ emerging in a speech-bubble from their mouths.

i, too, used to blame the bull. But then, 25 years ago, while researching a documentary for the BBC, i changed my mind. the producer and i wanted to film inside a country church.

A notice on the door told us that the key to the church could be obtained from the house next door. When we rang the doorbell, a woman appeared in tears, almost too distraught to speak.

it turned out that her husband, a farmer, had just been trampled by his own cows, and was now in intensive care. he had walked the same route through the same field for the past 15 years, but for some reason on that day the cows had chosen to attack.

fortunately, the story had a happy ending: when we returned, a few weeks later, the farmer was out of hospital, and in recovery.

By chance, the following year a friend in Yorkshire was also attacked by cows. her dog had been butted over a hedge, and she herself was severely bruised. Ever since then, i have trodden rather more cautiously when navigating my way through any field of cows.

Annoyingly, my two favourite walks in the countryside near our house both involve dodging through cows. Where once i might have found them dopy and dreamy, i now regard them as a threat. ‘Don’t come the innocent with me!’ i mutter, as their big lazy eyes follow my every step.

on one of these walks, the field is bordered by an estuary. often, the cows follow me for a good few yards alongside the estuary path at a discreet but unnerving distance.

i do my best to look calm and composed, mindful of the old wives’ tale that they only attack if they sense you are frightened.

But beneath my happy-go-lucky exterior, my brain is trying to calculate whether i could escape an attack by leaping head-first into the estuary, or whether a highlytrained crack-squadron of marine cows might swim after me. Call me a coward, but the statistics back me up. government figures show that, on average, five people are killed by cows in the UK every year, whereas dogs — including rottweilers, Alsatians, bull terriers and the like — kill only two people a year. in America, for every one person killed by sharks there are 20 killed by cows. Yet it is the poor old shark that finds itself demonised in hollywood films and countless TV documentaries. As far as i know there is no horror film called Moo! (‘Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the meadow…’). in fact, cows only ever feature in children’s stories — the Cow that Laid An Egg, Buttercup’s Lovely Day, Sailor Moo — in which they are wrongly portrayed as loveable and just that little bit daffy.

BUT in reality, cows attack in groups, and can be eerily well-coordinated, with one or two cows leading the charge and the others following.

‘i fell forwards and rolled into a ball and every time i tried to get up they jumped on me’, recalled one survivor. ‘they were rolling me along the hill with their legs, trying to get me to open up.’ they generally trample and kick, and sometimes manage to get their heads beneath their victims so as to hurl them into the air.

i’m off for a walk in Wales next week with friends who may well laugh at me as i totter sheepishly around fields of cows, rather than plunging straight in. But with age comes caution, and, given time, the cow will make cowards of us all.