Rural Mythos

When I moved from Chicago to the boonies of west central Wisconsin as a lad, I was regaled with various stories of the rural life. One such tale that I heard several times from different people concerned a deerhunter. The hunter came upon a bazillion-pointed buck only to have his shotgun act like an M-16 and be rendered useless. The buck, seeing the human predator helpless charges forcing the hunter to seek safety in a tree. Ever the predator, the guy jumps down from his perch and wrestles the deer to the ground whereupon he kills it with his own two hands.

Another story I heard frequently was about cow-tipping. Cow-tipping is when bored rural youth sneak up to sleeping cows and push them over. Well, the probing eye of science has investigated the fable of my former interlocutors for the benefit of city folk and declared it a rural myth.



As the above graphic shows, it's all a matter of physics.

Newton’s second law of motion, force equals mass multiplied by acceleration, shows that the high acceleration necessary to tip the cow would require a higher force. “Biology also complicates the issue here because the faster the [human] muscles have to contract, the lower the force they can produce. But I suspect that even if a dynamic physics model suggests cow tipping is possible, the biology ultimately gets in the way: a cow is simply not a rigid, unresponding body."

So there you have it - another rural myth exposed.