Cattle are the most common cause of death in the UK farming industry – with some figures suggesting cows kill more people than dogs. So what can you do if the herd approaches?
“I remember feeling I was about to die,” says Jill Gilmore. She and her husband, Mark, were walking their dog, Finnegan, in the Stockport area and had just climbed over a stile on a public footpath. Jill was slightly ahead, with Finnegan on a short lead, when a group of cows appeared. “It was just instant,” she says: the herd of 20 or 30 cows attacked her, butting her to the ground. She doesn’t remember the details, just snippets: hooves coming down on her and an acceptance that she was dying. “I had kind of relaxed,” she says. “Then Mark came up to me and just absolutely shouted at me to get up. He helped me up, got my arms around his neck.” He tried to get them hurriedly out of the field, dragging her under a gap in the fence, conscious the cows could attack again. She finds it easier to talk about than Mark does, she says. “He actually witnessed it.” She told him to leave her to die, he says.
The cows had broken both sides of Gilmore’s pelvis, 12 ribs and two bones in her neck and her arm, her lungs were damaged and she had head and ankle injuries. She underwent three days of surgery and spent two weeks in intensive care (“the worst part,” she says), for 10 days of which she was on a ventilator. After that came three months of hospital rehab, much of it with a “massive external fixator on my pelvis, like a scaffolding frame”, which meant she could not move or even roll independently. “My dignity was really taken away from me.”
