City boy checking in.
So, this one time out on a hike in a semi-rural area, the trail opened out on a grassy riverbank kind of place, and there were a dozen or so cows between me and the path onwards.
Now, I mostly grasp which end of a cow the grass goes in, but that’s about my limit; I have no real idea how they operate IRL.
I ended up carefully edging my way past them and gave them as much space as I possibly could, and got extremely stared at by all of them, who probably thought I was nuts.
Just out of curiosity - how careful did I need to be? Can you just like walk through the middle of them, or would that be asking for trouble?
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…
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.
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.