Quick Take
- A cow's real top speed will make you rethink every chase scene you've pictured.
- Chasing them is the worst thing anyone can do, and the reason lies in a cow's body.
- One thing about these cattle makes the real danger far bigger than a runaway cow.
- The new plan borrows a trick from a famed animal-handling researcher.
Two police cruisers had one of the cattle boxed in against a guardrail on Main Street. An officer reached out to grab hold of it. The animal shrugged him off, hopped the rail and was gone.
That’s been the week in Marshfield, Massachusetts. A black Angus bull and cow, kept by a family on Main Street for breeding and beef, got out of their pen last Thursday and were still loose on Monday, Nov. 9, after the town tried ropes, drones and even a professional cowboy. “It’s extremely difficult to catch them because of how unpredictable their behavior is, plus the size of them,” Police Chief Phil Tavares told Jessica Trufant of The Patriot Ledger. “They’re high-risk animals.” They aren’t pets, and they don’t have names.
Tavares started his career as the town’s assistant animal control officer, so he had some idea of what a loose cow might do. The pair has blown past that idea. “They’re a lot faster than I ever imagined,” he said. “They can jump over things I never thought a cow could jump over.”
They’re a lot faster than I ever imagined
Faster Than They Look
A grazing animal of that size doesn’t look like it would be quick-moving, but you might be surprised. Cattle usually run around 17 miles an hour and can hit nearly 25 in short bursts, but they usually only turn on that speed when they’re scared.
Why Chasing Makes It Worse
Cattle cut off from their herd get highly stressed and can turn aggressive, Tavares said, and chasing them only pours fuel on that. Scientists have seen the same pattern play out in calmer settings, too. When a cow is separated from the herd, its body shows it — a faster heartbeat, more mooing and more pacing around. Put the animal back with its herd, and that settles right back down.
That’s exactly what happened here, and it’s the one part of this chase that went right. The bull and cow found each other again and holed up in a patch of woods away from the road and away from whatever was stressing them out in the first place.
The Part Nobody Is Laughing At
They’re black, and on a dark road that makes them almost impossible to spot. Main Street has a 45 mph speed limit, and Tavares said his biggest fear isn’t that the cattle will hurt someone directly. It’s that a driver will hit one of them.
Bait, Not Rope
The plan now is to back off, give the two of them space, and try to lure them home with food instead of chasing them down. A veterinarian is on standby to tranquilize them if that becomes necessary. It’s a page straight out of how animal-handling experts manage skittish livestock elsewhere. Researcher Temple Grandin once got bison calves to walk calmly through handling chutes for food rewards just by breaking every new step down into something small and unthreatening, since animals that get restrained suddenly tend to panic.
Cattle typically only max out on their top speed when they feel scared or threatened.
©iStock.com/PatrickZiegler
Marshfield Is Having a Wonderful Time
The escape has brought out the puns. “Watch out for the police steak out,” one resident wrote under the police department’s warning on Facebook. It’s also brought out a wave of AI-generated images putting the cattle at the local skate park, aboard the harbormaster’s boat, and on a milk carton as a “missing cow” ad. Some locals have even floated raising money to buy the pair’s freedom once they’re caught, given what they were originally being raised for.
“In the meantime,” Tavares said, “they’re living their best lives.”
