cow tipping

[Homegrown Tomatoes]

When we were in OK last weekend, I bought a t-shirt with an upside down cow.  The shirt says, "In Oklahoma, nobody tips like a cow."  It's John Deere green and yellow.  I thought it was funny.  Wore it today to Bible study and about three or four of us spent a good twenty minutes trying to explain what cow-tipping was to the rest of them.  I thought everyone knew what cow-tipping was... or had at least heard of it.  Guess some folks just lead a sheltered life.

[MountainDon]

You're a well educated, non-sheltered woman of the world, aren't you Homegrown?  You wouldn't have any first hand experience in hat field would you?   :-?  :-/

[StinkerBell]

Cows fly in my state. Well, no not fly they fall from the sky.

[glenn kangiser]

That is a tall one, Stinkerbell... but true.

http://blog.oregonlive.com/breakingnews/2007/11/cow_falls_from_sky_barely_miss.html

Hooda thunk :-?

[Homegrown Tomatoes]

Holy Cow!  I bet they were thankful just to be alive after that, and  a little hestitant to drive under any cliffs!  That would be pretty surreal...

[Homegrown Tomatoes]

You're a well educated, non-sheltered woman of the world, aren't you Homegrown?  You wouldn't have any first hand experience in hat field would you?   :-?  :-/

Well, I won't say I'm not sheltered because in a lot of ways I probably am, but I just thought that everyone knew what cow tipping was... I was exhausted just trying to explain it to a few of the ones who've never heard of it...  Not that I have much first-hand experience with it...our preferred game with the cows when I was a kid was to get down on all fours and start grazing and acting like a cow until they all came around us to see what we were doing.  If we were really good at it, the younger ones would walk right up and sniff of us, and take a swipe at us with those big ol' scratchy tongues.  We got several of them tame to the point we could just walk up and pet them in the field and they'd follow us all around.  There was one woman who had much first hand experience with it, apparently in her younger, more impressionable days, and she was talking about it working better if you'd had something to drink first, and so then it seemed like in the minds of the ones who had never heard about it, it was inextricably linked with alcohol consumption... anyway, it was like trying to explain something really tricky to a non-native English speaker, even though they were all American.  And they didn't seem to get the play on words with "tipping"  ie. Nobody tips like a cow.  It was hilarious particularly because they thought it was so un-funny.

[StinkerBell]

Holy Cow!  I bet they were thankful just to be alive after that, and  a little hestitant to drive under any cliffs!  That would be pretty surreal...

No, not Holy Cow, more like SPLAT Cow. Her name was Michelle  :'(

[glenn kangiser]

Homegrown, could you walk us through a complete cow tipping DIY tutorial?  Nothing like getting the real dirt from a real cow girl -- minus the aroma.

[MountainDon]

Great idea Glenn!! With pictures and so on... demonstrations of the correct grip(s)...  

[glenn kangiser]

I have a feeling this is going to be very enjoyable.

I wonder if she will be able to come up with a real cow? :-?

[Homegrown Tomatoes]

No, but I found a virtual one... go ahead and tip it yourself!  
http://www.nwlink.com/~timelvis/cowtip.html

[Homegrown Tomatoes]

Hey, this guy his high-tech... and he does his cow-tipping in broad daylight.
http://www.vnews.com/cowtipping/

[Homegrown Tomatoes]

According to the resident expert here locally(not speaking of myself because I've never actively done anything that could harm an animal) it takes two strong guys to knock over a sleeping cow.  I find it hard to believe because cows are pretty alert to anything sneaking up on them, and they're also pretty jumpy.  I was always under the impression that it was something like snipe hunting that you tricked city kids into doing...  however, I've heard several people swear they've done it.  From a physics standpoint, it seems highly improbable that one person could successfully tip over a cow, and from a logical standpoint even less probable that two drunk idiots could actually sneak up on a sleeping cow.  I don't know.  A lot of people I know profess to have successfully tipped a cow.  I think being tipped by a cow is more probable.    Still the idea is funny.  When the movie Cars came out, I thought the tractor tipping scene was pretty hilarious.  Maybe I'll take some of that group snipe hunting, too... when trying to explain cow tipping, I brought up snipe hunting which produced even more blank stares...  they were thoroughly confused because I was saying it was a joke and another gal was arguing that it was real and she'd done it in high school...

[glenn kangiser]

That was cool Homegrown, but we kinda wanted to see the one you told us about where you drink all the beer first.

[Homegrown Tomatoes]

I asked the girl who was talking about having participated in the sport of cow-tipping on multiple occasions if she had any pictures and of course she didn't...  I wonder if she was the one hiding out in the car watching for the farmer to open the front door and step out with a .22.  We had a long driveway when I was a kid and a lot of times teens looking for a place to park or a place to get in trouble would come up the driveway toward the house.  I don't think any of them ever got in the fences to attempt to tip any cows, mainly because my grandad would meet them at the top of the drive with his gun in hand, usually alerted early on by the dogs.  Furthermore, he strung his fences so tightly that no one who wasn't completely sober would've dared try to duck through one... although we did find a fence cut one morning and tire tracks right down into the pond (and none coming out) and the local police chief was too lazy to come check it out... then about 7-8 years later when there was a drought, lo and behold a car surfaced in the pond.  Turns out it'd been stolen in Louisianna from a high school coach or teacher around the same time those mysterious tracks had showed up.  Thankfully there were no signs of any bodies or anything, but the trunk was full of clothing and such... pretty creepy.

[MountainDon]

To get serious   for a moment. I don't actually know anyone who ever tipped a cow. Never seen it myself. It does sound like something fun to do after a six pack or a jar or two of vodka and Donald Duck orange juice on a dark summers night.  :-/

Part of the necessary premise to cow tipping is that they sleep standing up, so you can sneak up and tip 'em over. Now, I'm not a connoisseur of cows, but the ones around here that pasture in the National Forest over the summer around my mountains spend an awful lot of time laying down. None have ever looked like they're sleeping standing up. And these dudes have to stay relatively alert as they do risk attack by the odd group of coyotes. (We heard two night-time events over the summer, and the next day found freshly killed cow).

It also seems to me that physics would dictate that the tipping of a cow would require more muscle than one or even two lickered up farm boys could muster. It would be interesting to have some irrefutable proof though.

YMMV

[glenn kangiser]

I wonder if a cow ever fell on someone who was trying to tip it?

[Homegrown Tomatoes]

Not that I know of, but a kid I went to school with got stepped on trying to do it.  Broke his pelvis and his upper leg and he was in this horrible cast and a wheelchair half the school year.  He was  a little bitty guy, too.  I felt sorry for him.  He had heard about cow tipping and his dad had cows, so he decided to try early one morning before school when he was doing his chores... not a good idea.  I think it was his plan to try to fit in with all the local rednecks (he'd moved there from Mexico the year before and was picked on because he was really book smart but without a lick of common sense... from then on he was the "moron who got stepped on by a cow.")  Poor kid. He was a pretty nice kid... just gullible... and funny as all get out.  

I've got a great idea, Glenn... why don't you and Don set up a camera and try it yourselves one weekend?  You can make a mini-documentary and be famous on YouTube or StupidVideos.com for a few days.    I would think that surely the two of you could tip a cow over together.  I have a feeling it is something like the time that my dad and some of his neighbors got a little messed up and decided to steal apples off the neighbor's tree by jumping out of a moving van doing about 45 mph, kind of A-team style... it sounds more fun in theory than it really is the next day when you're trying to dislodge your sunglasses from where they were embedded in your forehead the night before.  

[StinkerBell]

I wonder if a cow ever fell on someone who was trying to tip it?

That would mean that person became a cow pie.....lol

[glenn kangiser]

If Don and I were a bit closer together geographically we could probably get into all kinds of trouble, but I don't know if you'd catch us tipping a cow.  I haven't really had the urge to get that intimate with a cow for a while. :-/  

Homegrown, they say if you lift a calf every day and carry it around, then you will still be able to do it by the time it is full grown.  What do you think. :-?

Stink, you reminded me about the time a kid I went to school with was out in the barn milking when he had the misfortune of walking behind a cow who was making a fresh cow pie when she sneezed.  Apparently this caused her to spray him from top to bottom with that nice fresh cow pie mix.

[Homegrown Tomatoes]

One of my grandma and great aunts' favorite stories is about my great aunt Zelma, the youngest of their 8 siblings.  On Sunday mornings, the girls always got their hair curled for church, and Zelma came prissing around into the barn one Sunday morning singing, "I'm the prettiest, and you are all ugly!"  (Until she died, Aunt Zelma always introduced herself as "the youngest and the prettiest".)  Anyway as she twirled around singing her song in her Sunday best, the cow my Grandma was milking raised her tail and plopped a big wet cow patty right on top of Zelma's freshly washed and curled hair! Aunt Zelma was about 5 or 6 then, and the older girls took her back to the house, wailing pathetically.  (Of course, I have it on good authority that all the older siblings enjoyed it immensely.)  Aunt Zelma wasn't nearly as upset by the cow poop on her head as she was because she thought that she had to wait a whole week to get her hair washed again!!!    

[glenn kangiser]

That's a good one.

In other cow thoughts, anybody ever have cow chip throwing contests, or look for fishing worms under the semi-dry cow pies?

...and this bit of trivia just in... My CB handle when trucking cross country was The Cow Chip.  Since things are a bit hard to understand on the CB, I was occasionally asked, "What did you say your handle was, cow $hit?"" :-?

[Homegrown Tomatoes]

 

We used to get into cow patty and dirt clod "wars" when I was a kid.  You always looked for that perfect cow chip, the one that was dry on the outside and still wet on the inside, as your secret weapon.  We didn't look for fishing worms under cow pies too often... the best fishing worms were around the sink drain.