Poor cows 🙁
Status: Mostly Verified – The video is current and there are news reports about thousands of cattle in Kansas dying from heat exhaustion recently. These are likely the same subject.
Thousands of cattle were found dead in the morning where they had been fine just the night before on a farm in Kansas. The likely cause appears to be heat exhaustion as summer temps in the area are climbing to 100 degrees.
Watch the heartbreaking video here:
Of course this being the internet there are already nearly a dozen different conspiracy theories, but the most likely culprit is probably a heat wave that hit the heard. KSCB news interviewed a Kansas State University professor and expert on beef cattle medicine who seems to think this incident was caused by spiking summer heat in the region.
“When there is a ‘perfect storm’ of too much heat and no opportunity for nighttime cooling, cattle can accumulate heat and die from the stress. It’s a situation that can hit both feedlot and grazing animals. Heat stress doesn’t happen all at one time. Cattle accumulate heat during the day, and then over the nighttime hours, it takes four to six hours for them to dissipate that heat. As long as we have a cooling effect at night, cattle can mostly handle the heat. Where we run into issues is where we have two to four days in a row of minimal nighttime cooling, and we start the day with the heat load we accumulated the day before still there.” – A.J. Tarpoff, Kansas State University Associate Professor / Extension Specialist in Beef Cattle Production Medicine.
Thanks Y’all:
In researching this video we found two great articles that we believe contained factual information about the recent cattle deaths in Kansas. “Thousands of Cattle Reported Dead” by Victoria G. Myers for Progressive Farmer and “Heat Causing Death in Kansas Cattle” by Joe Denoyer for KSCB.
Featured image a compilation of screenshots from the video embedded above
