Aetiology

I grew up in the middle of vast swaths of northwestern Ohio farmland. My dad, the youngest of 13 kids, was raised on a farm, most of my uncles still farm to some extent, and collecting eggs and shearing sheep was something I got to do regularly as a kid on visits to Grandma's house. But I'd honestly never heard of "cow tipping" until I went to Swanky East Coast College (TM) and got asked if that was a pasttime I and my rural friends engaged in. (Obviously, it wasn't). Well, now researchers at the University of British Columbia have data to show that it's likely that all these tipping stories are simply myths.

Ms Boechler, now a trainee forensics analyst for the Royal Canadian Mounted Corps, concluded in her initial report that a cow standing with its legs straight would require five people to exert the required force to bowl it over.

A cow of 1.45 metres in height pushed at an angle of 23.4 degrees relative to the ground would require 2,910 Newtons of force, equivalent to 4.43 people, she wrote.

Dr Lillie, Ms Boechler’s supervisor, revised the calculations so that two people could exert the required amount of force to tip a static cow, but only if it did not react.

“The static physics of the issue say . . . two people might be able to tip a cow,” she said. “But the cow would have to be tipped quickly — the cow’s centre of mass would have to be pushed over its hoof before the cow could react.”

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Another problem is that cows, unlike horses, do not sleep on their feet — they doze. Ms Boechler said that cows are easily disturbed. “I have personally heard of people trying but failing because they are either using too few people or being too loud.

“Most of these ‘athletes’ are intoxicated.”