They came at me at a trot, twenty or so of them, heads up, and I did the exact wrong thing. I turned and walked fast for the hedge with my back to them. My heart was going hard enough that I could feel it in my ears. When I finally stopped and turned around, they had stopped too, about fifteen feet off, standing in a rough line staring at me with their ears forward like a row of enormous curious children.
They were yearling bullocks. They were bored. They had come over to see what I was, which is the single most common thing cattle do to walkers, and I had turned it into a chase by running from it. Nothing happened. But I sat on the far side of that hedge for a while feeling stupid, and I have thought about that field a lot since.
Curiosity looks a lot like a charge
Young cattle move as a block and they move fast, and when twenty of them start toward you at once it reads as an attack because your body has no other category for it. But the tells are different. Curious cattle have their heads up and their ears forward, they come in a loose bunch rather than a line, they stop and start, and they will usually halt on their own about ten or twenty feet out and then just stand there.
The ones to take seriously look different. A cow with a young calf gets between you and the calf and stays there, and she will keep facing you no matter which way you move. That is not curiosity, that is a mother doing her job, and she is right and I am the problem. Any animal that lowers its head, turns side on, paws at the ground or keeps advancing after you have stopped moving is telling you something plain.
Most of the fields I cross hold dry cows, bullocks or heifers, and most of the time the entire encounter is a stare and then boredom. But I stopped assuming and started spending ten seconds at the gate looking for small calves before I open it.
What I do at the gate now, before I go in
I stand at the gate and count roughly, see where the animals are clustered, and pick my line before I commit. If they are all in the far corner, I walk the near edge. If they are lying down chewing, which is a good sign, I still give them room. If there are calves, I look for a way around the outside of the field, and if there is not one I turn around. A walk is a hobby. A cow with a calf is not negotiating.
I keep the field edge on one side of me if I can, so there is only one direction to be surprised from, and I keep a mental note of where the nearest gate or gap is. Not because I expect to sprint for it, but because knowing where it is stops me making a bad decision in a hurry.
I go through at a steady walk. Not fast, not creeping. Fast makes me interesting and creeping makes me suspicious.
The dog thing, which I had backwards
For a long time I had it in my head that if cattle came at us, I should hold my dog close and put myself between them. That is precisely wrong, and a farmer set me straight on it in a yard one afternoon while he was hosing down a trailer.
Cattle are not usually interested in the person. They are interested in the dog, because a dog reads to them as a threat to calves. If you are holding the lead you are standing in the middle of that argument. What he told me, and what everybody I have asked since has repeated, is that if cattle come at you and you have a dog, you let the dog go. Off the lead, drop it, let it run. The dog is faster than the cattle and will get itself out, and the cattle follow the dog and not you. Then you walk quietly to the edge of the field and collect your dog on the far side.
Everything in me hates that instruction and I hope I never have to follow it. But the alternative is being in the middle of a herd holding a rope attached to the thing they are worried about.
Better still is not to be there. If a field has cattle and I have the dog with me, I look for another way around before I open the gate. That has cost me maybe forty minutes total across a whole summer, which is nothing.
If they do come, what actually works
Stop. Turn and face them. Do not run, because running is the one thing guaranteed to make it worse.
Stand your ground and let them stop, because they nearly always do. If they keep coming, raise your arms wide, make yourself big, and speak loudly and firmly. Not a scream. A low, loud voice, the sort of noise a person makes at animals rather than the sort of noise prey makes. A walking pole held out sideways adds width and I have used mine that way twice.
Then back away at a walk, facing them, toward the nearest edge or gate. Do not turn your back until there is a fence between you. That is the whole method, and it works because it makes you into a firm and boring object rather than a fleeing one.
The things that get people into trouble
Walking between a cow and her calf, usually by accident, because the calf was lying down in long grass and invisible from the gate. Cutting straight through the middle of a bunched herd instead of going around. Letting a dog off among stock. And running, always running.
There is also the thing nobody wants to say out loud, which is that bulls are usually not the problem. Most of the difficult encounters people have are with cows protecting calves, or with a big group of bored young stock that turns into a jostle. If there is a bull sign on a gate I take it at face value and go somewhere else, but I do not relax just because there is no sign.
Respect, not fear
I do not want to talk anybody out of crossing a pasture. Most of the best walking I do goes straight through fields with animals in them, and in three seasons the total damage has been one embarrassing scramble at a hedge and a lot of long stares.
What changed is that I stopped treating a field of cattle as scenery. They are half a ton each, they are somebody’s asset and somebody’s year, and they have opinions about dogs. I look before I open the gate, I pick a line, I walk steady, and if the field says no I go around it. That is the entire skill, and the field of bullocks that watched me scramble through a hedge taught me most of it.