Last winter, I found out something really fascinating: Cows kill more people than sharks. It’s true. Here’s Popular Mechanics on the statistics:
Between 2003 and 2008, 108 people died from cattle-induced injuries across the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s 27 times the whopping four people killed in shark attacks in the United States during the same time period, according to the International Shark Attack File. Nearly all those cow-related fatalities were caused by blunt force trauma to the head or chest; a third of the victims were working in enclosed spaces with cattle.
Pretty impressive for an animal usually described as mellow and passive.
It also throws some sharp relief on the way we talk about sharks. (And, for that matter, on the way we think about risk.) Much like the dichotomy between not-terribly-dangerous-but-highly-feared airplane travel and highly-dangerous-but-not-terribly-feared car travel, cows sneak in under our cultural radar—they kill effectively and relatively often, while we save up all our terror for the much, much less deadly shark.
I found out yesterday that August 12 through August 16 is Shark Week on the Discovery Channel. So I thought I’d provide a nice counterbalance here. From now through August 18 I will provide you with one example of cow-related killings every day. I should note that I’m not trying to make light of the incidents I post here. These are all very real deaths. People were hurt emotionally and that’s not funny. What I’d like to do, though, is use these incidents to get us all thinking about how we assign risk to certain situations, and why some things are terrifying and others aren’t and why that distinction is often entirely independent of the actual risks. We kick things off with an example from Ireland. This tragic case happened only a couple of months ago:
Michael O’Dea, 74, had gone to check on a calf with his son Eddie at their farm in Co Clare on Saturday morning. The crazed cow is understood to have turned on the younger man — and Mr O’Dea intervened to protect his son. The cow then attacked the pensioner who was fatally injured. It’s understood the animal kicked the helpless pensioner several times at the farm at Clonina near Cree.
Read the full story of Michael O’Dea at The Irish Sun
Read Popular Mechanics’ cow attack survival guide
Image: Cow, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from jelles’s photostream