I don’t know what people were thinking out in the old west of North America with the cowboys and their giant herds of cows. It being the old west, everyone had guns. Sure that’s okay if you use yours. Then the cows would stampede away from you. But what about if someone shot theirs on the other side of the cows from you. They would stampede toward you.
I guess that’s why everyone had horses. And that’s why being a horse thief was considered such a heinous crime. If you were on a horse you could flee the stampede. At least until it peters out. But what happened at night? When you were no longer on your horse.
At night could be prime time for cattle rustlers to steal the cows. It’s simple. Approach the cows on the opposite side of the cowboy encampment. Then shoot your guns and yell. The cows would trample to death all the sleeping cowboys. There would be no eyewitnesses of your cattle rustling.
Which is why the cowboys had to stand guard and also why they would have a big chuck wagon with them. The guard would hopefully stop the cattle rustlers. But if it didn’t, You could put your chuck wagon between the sleeping cowboys and the cows, That way if the cows stampeded toward the cowboys, they would avoid the bigger chuck wagon and thus go around the cowboys.
So the old west was survivable, even with stampedes. But this has got me thinking. Sure the shooter is immune to stampedes from most locales. But what if they shot their gun while being in the middle of the huge heard of cows?
Of course the cows in front of the shooter are going to head away at full tilt. The ones to the side would even go in the same direction as the front cows. But what of the cows to the rear?
Would they actually flee in the same direction as their compatriots? In other words, would they head into the scary noise? If so, the shooter may be killed.
Or will they turn all the way around and then run? Or will they not run at all? While I might want the answer to this question, I am not going to go into the middle of a herd of cattle to test this out. I guess some questions just weren’t made to be answered by me.
