Thursday’s edition of the Daily Press featured a story about holiday tipping – tipping the mailman, tipping the garbage collector, tipping the paper deliverer.

But what about tipping the cow?

According to legend (probably more of a “rural” legend than an “urban” one), people who engage in cow-tipping sneak up on cows that are sleeping upright and knock them over.

It’s not the kind of activity that sounds very humane – but then again, it’s not the kind of activity that sounds very plausible either.

Various Web sites make mention of cow-tipping. In fact, The online version of The Times, a British paper, includes a story in which a zoology student, Tracy Boechler, conducted a study and concluded that an average cow standing with its legs straight would require 4.43 people pushing on it (at an angle of 23.4 degrees) to actually tip it over, given that the cow weights 682 kilograms.

“The static physics of the issue say ...two people might be able to tip a cow,” Boechler said in The Times. “But the cow would have to be tipped quickly – the cow’s center of mass would have to be pushed over its hoof before the cow could react.”

But according to Boechler, Newton’s second law of motion – force equals mass multiplied by acceleration – shows that the high acceleration needed to tip a cow would require higher force than two people could exert.

“Biology also complicates the issue here because the faster the [human] muscles have to contract, the lower the force they can produce,” said Boechler. “But I suspect that even if a dynamic physics model suggests cow-tipping is possible, the biology ultimately gets in the way. A cow is simply not a rigid, unresponding body.”

Bob Patterson raises cattle near Hulbert, and he’s skeptical that anything like cow-tipping is actually possible.

“Cows will sleep standing up, but the majority of the time, they lie down,” he said. “And once you touch a cow, it’ll be awake immediately. I just don’t think you can do it.”

In fact, according to Patterson, just getting to the cow to tip it over would be hard enough. The actual mechanics of trying to turn it over would practically be a “moo” point. (Sorry; couldn’t resist.)

“I don’t think you could get that close,” said Patterson. “They have a pretty good sense of smell, so if you even got close to one, it would smell you.”

Gabe Speth grew up around cattle, and though he didn’t exactly deny ever trying to tip over a bovine, he does think cow-tipping is probably more fiction than reality.

“I think it’s a myth,” he said. “I’ve found that cows generally don’t like to be tipped. But maybe I’ve just had experiences with light-sleeping cows.”

According to the online encyclopedia, www.wikipedia.com, “There is no evidence, aside from mostly unreliable eyewitness reports, that any cows have ever been tipped in the purported manner.”

So Patterson and Speth may be right.

But to add something like professional credibility to our research, we contacted an expert – a veterinarian.

Unfortunately, Tahlequah vet Bill Elliott didn’t seem to take our cow-tipping research very seriously. We can’t vouch for the accuracy of the following quotes from Elliott.

“Cow tipping? Yeah, we’ve gone out and found entire herds on their sides,” he said. “We try to put them back upright, pointing toward the north star if it’s nighttime, and toward the east during the day, so they can find their bearings. There are always empty beer cans around, but we can’t tell if they’ve been consumed by the cows or the people who tipped them.”

Roger Williams is the OSU Extension educator for Cherokee County, and as such, he usually aware of any local bovine issues. Cow-tipping, he said, isn’t one of them. But it could be, he suggested, because of the breeding.

“I think cows are smarter than they used to be, with hybrid breeds,” said Williams. “But I put cow-tipping right up there with snipe-hunting. Then again, if cows or horses do a good job for you, they deserve to be tipped, just like a waitress or anyone else should.”