The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Attacks by livestock raise issues of safety
Advice: Practices can be altered to make handling of animals safer
Scottish farmers have been challenged to think about improving livestock handling systems and making them safer and more efficient.
The advice comes in Farm Safety Week as producers raise awareness of accidents involving livestock.
Last year Orkney farmer Michael Stevenson was working with one of his 180 breeding cows when he experienced something that would change his farm’s practices around calving time forever.
He went into a pen to check on a newly-calved heifer and was bent down beside her when she suddenly turned and battered him to the ground.
“I don’t have much recollection of what happened before and after the accident, but I’d managed to get over the gate, and shouted on my wife who thankfully was nearby, to come and help me as I could hardly move,” said Mr Stevenson.
He suffered a dislocated hip and two broken ribs which meant several days in hospital following an operation to put his hip back together.
He was off work for four weeks and has since introduced safer working practices, including self-locking gates on all pens. He also ensures newly-calved cows are secured if they, or their calves, require to be handled.
Dumfriesshire farmer Margaret Butler has also described an attack by a newly-calved cow. She took her two West Highland terriers for an evening walk in the fields when a previously quiet cow suddenly sent her flying.
“She then came back for a second go at me whilst I was on the ground. Fortunately, her calf must have shouted and she went back to it. The whole thing could have only taken a few seconds,” she said.
“I never expected the cow to turn on me and I certainly never considered that she could have been aggressive at all.
“She must have felt threatened by me,” she said.
“I hobbled the 300 yards back to the house to my husband, David, who called an ambulance.
After I had x-rays, the consultant told me that I had broken my back. I had to lie flat on my back for four weeks on an orthopaedic bed, and was in hospital for another two weeks.”
Mrs Butler no longer takes dogs into fields where there are livestock, and gives even the quietest newly-calved cows much more respect.