OK, so nobody asked the question but now you’re all wondering.
The chances are you’ve heard about cow tipping while sitting in a pub. Cow tipping, by its nature, is a topic that’s usually reserved for pub talk. So what exactly is cow tipping?
According to the legend, cows sleep standing up so a drunk stealthy young cow tipper can sneak up on them and push them over. It’s no surprise that cow tipping as a concept dates back to pre-internet days when there wasn’t much to do.
There are a lot of people out there who are convinced that cow tipping is a thing. Although they probably haven’t fully considered the difficulty of trying to push over a four-legged animal that weighs 10 times as much as you do.
Let’s leave aside the ethical issues about harassing defenceless sleeping animals for the moment. We’re about to bust out our investigative journalism hat and ask “Is cow tipping a real thing or just a rural myth?”
Do people really go cow tipping?
Here’s the thing. People claim that it’s possible but there’s a decided lack of evidence to back that up. There’s more footage of Big Foot than there is of cow tipping. That rings alarm bells in an era of smartphones.
Are we meant to believe that rural people don’t own smartphones? Or do cow tippers think that nobody would be interested in seeing them casually push over a 700kg animal? Either way, the lack of cow tipping footage seems suspicious.
Is it even possible?
The University of British Columbia decided to investigate the physics of cow tipping back in 2005. We can’t help but think that there must have been more pressing things to science that day but apparently not.
So here comes the science bit. According to the numbers, it would take at least two people to generate the force to push over a cow, providing the cow was a willing participant in the tipping. That’s probably an optimistic premise.
Realistically, the study found that it would take five strong people to push over a static cow. So cow tipping, if it did exist, would actually be a team sport. And one that could be more dangerous than you’d imagine!
There’s one glaring problem
There’s one pretty big stumbling block to the whole cow tipping theory. Cows don’t actually sleep standing up. So there’s that.
That means you’re relying on a notoriously nervous animal to quietly stand there while five lads try to push it over. We’re starting to see why there’s a lack of footage out there.
We’re willing to concede that someone, somewhere may once have tipped a cow. Maybe the stars were aligned that night and all the circumstances required for cow tipping happened to come together for this one lad or lady. But cow tipping as an activity? We’re going to have to call bull on that.
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