No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
Depends very heavily on the cows. Cattle rancher here. Be careful about it and *most cattle are OK to walk among.
Generally speaking, most farm cattle are timid towards people. They may come check you out and encircle you as a herd, but will usually scurry away if you move suddenly, and don't care if you're just in the field with them. They are herbivorous herd/prey animals, after all. The cattle my parents raise, perfectly safe to walk through. Hell the calves will often come up and sniff you out and rub up against you.
Some remote range cattle can be more wild. They might take off running if they see you within a half mile, or they might come running towards you if they deem you a threat.
The real danger often lies with bulls (hanging balls and huge shoulder) or cows with young calves (<1mo old). Both of these can be very unpredictable.
I've interacted with some bulls that were as gentle as can be and some that would rip your skin off if you weren't on the other side of a panel. You should never go into a paddock with an unknown bull, ever.
And even the most timid cow can start squaring up if she has a very young calf still in need of protection.
It's something you mostly have to learn how to read. Cows are expressive. They have body language. They speak with their head and their tails, and they look with their ears. For me it's easy to tell if a cow is safe to approach, but it is a learned skill.
When you approach cows, make noise. Nothing racocious but just talking in a firm tone to them is enough. Make sure the herd olknows your approaching long before you get close enough to be a danger, never suprise a cow. Always keep a distance of minimum 30 feet unless they approach you themselves out of curiosity.
A head and/or tail held very high means they are alert and focused on you, this usually means they are nervous and about to fight-or-flight. Back off slowly and try not to turn away.
If a herd dispersed while grazing begins to bunch up together, that also means they're getting nervous. Just avoid the bunch and walk away from whatever direction they're heading.
A head held low while looking at you, or still grazing means they are relaxed. They dont usually lower their head to "charge" like in the cartoons until they're already moving. You're new to the field so they'll always look at you. Move smoothly and steadily, they won't bother you.
Me as a kid: running away from a curious cow
The cow, running behind me: "wait, I want to check you out! What are we running away from anyways?"
Haha yeah they'll do that. They can be insufferably curious.
I remember one time one of our border collie pups (not old enough to work but just getting introduced to the herd) got away from my mom. The cows all came over to check her out and she took off with the whole herd right after her!
She wasn't that interested in working much after that...
Me and my sister got encircled once by about ten cows while we wanted to visit our pony which was on the same absurdly big pasture. As they closed in, our little Shetland pony raced in to our rescue and showed them who's boss in seconds. That was surprising in multiple ways. Especially as I didn't expect ponies to be that protective to their scratch givers.
I hope your dog was able to overcome the trauma with time and therapy 😅
Small horses, like small dogs, are herd animals, are utterly convinced they are ten times their actual size, and will show this off at any opportunity.
Oh yeah, she's fine now. She was young and impressionable, wasn't hard to get her used to going back out there in better circumstances.
With both horses and cows, the stupidest most effective way to make them come see you is turning your back to them amd fiddle with your hands while looking busy.
That's how curious they are. I really like that trait of character.
If OP walks there frequently then he could also start to befriend them. Offer them some grass, give them some pets & head scratches. Cows are pretty social and usually friendly animals. So if you're nice to them, they'll be nice to you too, but most importantly learn that you're no threat to them.
Fun fact, cow licks feel like being rubbed by low-grade sandpaper.
I love this post. Thanks for sharing all that!