Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/12/05/cattle-guard-doesnt-work.html
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I think that was a boy cow, I think.
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I think I see an udder near the start of the video. Pretty sure it’s a cowette.
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Designed by the same people that brought you the border wall.
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I have a friend with a ranchette that had cattle guard on the driveway. Years ago, he had a dog who would lie on her belly and scoot across the guard. Funny as hell…wish I had a video (this was before phones with cameras.)
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which is to say, a cow.
“Cow” is one of the things we sort of don’t have a word for in English. “Bovine” can be used as a noun, and “beef” can be used for the animal, but they both sound weird. So we say “cow”, which means “female beef”, even when we mean “beef of indeterminate sex”.
“Battery” is kind of in the same boat. A “battery” means a set of something (like a battery of tests or an artillery battery), not necessarily a battery of. . . what? What do you call the electrical thingies? You can call it a “cell”, but that’s just the generic term for one of something that comes in sets (like a prison cell, or a terrorist cell, or a cell in an organism). Trust me when I say you’ll get funny looks if you call it a “galvanic pile”. And, anyway, isn’t a “pile” a battery?
Edited to add: Not only does “cow” mean only the female, it means the female of any of a wide swath of taxa, not just Bos taurus. “Cattle”, though it’s gender-neutral, has the same taxonomic problem.
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Notice how they never leave the Secret Cow Level? Cattle guards.
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You know, if they put a fence in the center of that it would fix the issue.
Shouldn’t the pit be deeper?
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Memories of my cross-country bicycle trip, trying to take back roads over to I-10 on a bike with a trailer…
ka-thunk ka-thunk ka-thunk
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I hate to ruin the fun, but those types of guards are used to prevent disease in cattle being transmitted elsewhere. Usually, they have some sort of diluted medicine or chemicals in the trench (you can see the hooves are dripping as the cattle crosses) to help stop the spread of disease. Surprisingly, formaldehyde is commonly used in the trench to stop hoof disease and foot and mouth disease.
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That makes me so nervous; if the cow falls she’ll break all four legs. 
(Trying to resist… failing… nervous laugh… then she’d be ground beef in both ways… )
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That’s a color guard
Indeed. Ones on dirt roads tend to fill up with dirt after many years and need to be cleaned out. If it’s not done you get the situation shown for an apparently unmaintained cattle guard. These are more a deterrent than an outright barrier anyway. I’ve seen cows jump guards when they are panicked by cars, coyotes, untrained domestic dogs, etc. Cows are more agile than they look.
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No, you’re thinking of a dip tank, where the livestock is driving through a fluid-filled trench deep enough to submerge the animal to treat for skin parasites.
The posted pic/vid is of a cattle guard. The slats and gap are normally sufficient to create a visual barrier for cattle. This cow, by experiment or chance, has discovered that she can simply “wade” between the pipes without harm.
Of course, we had a steer that learned he could simply jump the guard, which also works…
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