Crazy cows on public footpaths: is it time to change the law?

One of the most dangerous things I have ever done as a trekker was cross a field of bullocks above the Atlantic coast near the village of Boscastle in Cornwall.

As the grandson of a farmer, I was brought up to think of cows as benevolent, peaceful animals who are always more scared of you than you are of them.

On that cold January afternoon, as the salt-sea air caressed my cheeks, I didn’t have time to reflect on whether this was true, but it probably wasn’t. As I walked briskly towards the stile at the opposite end of the field – my escape route – I remember thinking that the 20 or so half-ton animals that were hurtling towards me were likely to intersect my passage before I reached the other side.

Despite my confusion, one very clear instruction was echoing through my brain: ‘Don’t run, whatever you do’ (which, incidentally, is the title of a very funny book by Peter Allison about the life of a safari guide in Namibia).

I stood my ground (not, I should add, out of courage, but because at that moment in time I didn’t particularly want to die). I might even have mock charged them a little. Whatever it was I did, it caused them to stop in confusion a few metres short of me.

I breathed a sigh of relief, but I still needed to exit the field somehow. This is when things became even more disconcerting. Each time I turned my back to walk a few metres further, I became aware of the leaders prancing on their front hooves like horses performing dressage. Or like bulls about to charge.

Regular walkers in Britain acquire a useful ability to glance at the underside of a cow out of the corner of their eye to establish whether it has udders. That I couldn’t spy an udder anywhere in this herd made me more uneasy.

I turned again and advanced a few metres. The bullocks resumed their prancing. I stopped again. They stopped too. We continued this strange dance all the way to the field boundary, where I hurdled the stile like Colin Jackson (faster, in fact), my heart pounding like a 10oz steak being slammed onto a slab by a mad butcher. It was a joy to be alive, and something of a surprise too.

This isn’t the only story I have. On a backpacking adventure in the Welsh hills, I remember crossing the bottom edge of a sloping field with a large pack on my shoulders. A herd of cows stood above me to my left, glaring at me menacingly. Below me to my right was a barbed wire fence, invented for trench warfare during the First World War so that the enemy could be mown down more easily by machine-gun fire. The war ended in 1918, but barbed wire is still used by British farmers so that walkers can be charged more easily by cattle while disentangling their shredded trousers.

Standing beside the fence a few metres in front of me was… (organ music building to a crescendo)… a small calf.

From an early age, my father – who, as well as being a farmer’s son, happened to be an animal psychologist – had explained to me that while cows are not generally aggressive, the exception is when they have calves. He was very clear that unless I knew what I was doing, I should never get between a cow and its calf. It goes without saying that I don’t know what I’m doing most of the time.

Now here I was walking slowly towards a calf as its mother and her friends eyed me suspiciously. It occurred to me that unless it moved quite soon, while I wouldn’t precisely be between the calf and its mother, I would be between its mother and a barrier designed for trench warfare. I turned around and walked back the way I came.

Every Friday evening, Edita and I walk to a pub 15 minutes from our home in the Cotswolds. Our usual route involves crossing a field with a ‘Bull in field’ sign at its entry point. The farmer is supposed to remove or cover this sign when the bull isn’t there, but this particular sign seems to be a permanent fixture, which of course means – and I’m sorry to spell this out – that most of the time the sign is bullshit. But if we find a fresh cow pat on the other side of this sign, then we prefer to walk along the main road where cars roar past at 60 miles an hour. It seems safer. As we do so, the cows often run down to the fence (barbed wire, of course) and follow us as we walk along the road beside them, jumping up and down like lunatics (the cows, not us).

In a field three miles in the other direction, we once witnessed a herd charging at a father and his two young children as they pedalled across a field on tiny bikes with stabilisers. The children were screaming in terror. Fortunately, the father remained calm and ushered his children to safety as the cows swarmed around them.

Only last Saturday, Edita and I had to take a diversion around the edge of a field when a mean-looking white cow got to its feet and charged to within 20 metres of us. To our relief it stopped short with an expression that said ‘get the fuck out of my field’ on its face. We did so as quickly as possible in the style of 50km Olympic walkers who are not allowed to break into a run.

Now, I expect some of my international readers may be thinking, what on earth are you doing walking through all these fields full of mad cows?

The reason is that here in the UK we have a network of public footpaths across private land. Much of this is farmland, and there are few legal prohibitions on what a farmer can put there, public footpath or not. For example, while it’s illegal for a farmer to put certain breeds of dairy bull in a field with public access, beef bulls are fine as long as there are cows in there with them (presumably beef bulls are too busy having sex to notice people passing through). Cows with calves are OK too, as are frisky bullocks like the ones I met above Boscastle. There is no requirement for farmers to fence off the cattle from the route of a footpath.

You may be wondering, is this really a big problem if cows are not dangerous?

A recent article in the Guardian described a series of gruesome incidents where walkers had been trampled by cows while trying to cross fields on a public footpath. These included a lady who had spent 10 days on a hospital ventilator with a shattered pelvis and a punctured lung, and who had only survived because her husband had dragged her splintered body to safety.

According to the Health and Safety Executive’s (HSE) statistics, 22 people in the UK were killed by cows in a 4-year period from 2019 to 2023. A quarter of these were walkers (the majority were farm workers). Most of the walkers had dogs with them, which make cows more aggressive. The Killer Cows website, an actual genuine website set up to report cow-related incidents by a walker who was himself mauled by cows, has reported 889 incidents since 2017.

It doesn’t have to be this way. A letter from a Frenchwoman in response to the Guardian article explained that it doesn’t in fact happen in France, because paths follow the edge of fields with a fence in between. While walking the Tour du Mont Blanc last month (of which more to come in a future post), I was surprised to discover how freely cows roam across mountaintops. I was equally surprised to discover how little it takes (a narrow section of cord that you might use for hanging up your washing) to keep them away from the path.

While researching this post, I came across some very sensible guidelines on the blog of a company called CXCS, who advise farmers on regulatory issues. These include such common-sense no-brainers as not putting cows with calves in a field with public access, not putting animals who exhibit signs of aggression in a field with public access, erecting a temporary fence alongside a public footpath if you need to keep cows in the field, and ensuring the route of the footpath is clearly marked.

Speaking from years of experience tiptoeing around herds of cows, I have to say that these guidelines are routinely ignored by farmers. I could be turning paranoid, but I also have a suspicion that cows are becoming more volatile (you could say that they are more prone to moooed swings). If guidelines are ignored then is it time to talk about changing them from guidelines into laws?

In the meantime, if this post has worried you then the Ramblers Association has another set of guidelines for successfully crossing a field of cows without getting killed. Happy trampling… I mean rambling.