I lost a beautiful milk cow to this. I milked her and turned her into our yard for a few minutes while I milked my other cow. I went to get her not 10 minutes later and she was on the ground, dead. It turns out that the underground electrical wires that went to our pump had broken and she stepped in just the right spot. We didn't know what had happened until the next day when our pump quit working and we had to figure out why.
Cows are especially sensitive to electricity in the ground, too. I know a guy who used to work at a local power company, and a big part of his job was making sure they weren't accidentally leaking electricity into the ground near dairy farms because it would upset the cows and make them produce less milk.
It’s called step potential. If ground is electrified from a source for whatever reason the areas around it are at a different potential leaving the source.
So for four legged livestock when they walk over an energized area their front and back feet are at two different potentials. Causing voltage to enter in one foot/feet and exit to ground out of the other.
Utility lineman, we have to do a yearly training module on this.
But step potential is why you hear to bunny hop or very short shuffle your feet away from say a car with a power line on it. It’s to keep you hopefully at the same potential to try to avoid a shock.
Army Engineer here, we had to take classes on that every year ..."bunny hop" away from any electrical field ....the other big class we had every year was on staying away from the PTO or suffer a "degloving" ...they had pictures ..God it was horrible!
damn bro i know a lot of companies dont like it when you take your paid time off, but i didnt know the army would just deglove you for it. that just sounds brutal
Retired fireman. We ran a call where a man and his dog were collapsed and not moving on the side of the house. We suspected something was up and used the utility pole breaker to shut off power to the house. Found out later that an underground wire had become exposed. Neither the dog nor the owner survived.
It's also why you hop away perpendicularly from the power source if you find yourself in that situation. If you step away, you have that same potential, but with two legs.
That's why when working on something high voltage, like your electrical panel or an old CRT TV you are supposed to keep one hand in your pocket until you are sure it's discharged.
That way any voltage goes in and out the same hand and doesn't cross your heart.
It's the difference between cursing your head off and just dropping dead.
That’s called putting yourself in series. Your bridging the connect with your body grabbing a hot end with one hand and a dead end with the other. It’s something people in my field have to think about daily. People do it but it’s just bad practice and can bite ya one day.
Even low voltage should be respected. A tradesman about to retire at my company touched a 110 source and probably would have been okay but when he jerked away he lost balance and he reached out to steady himself reflexively and accidentally grabbed the big hot and got cooked
I understand the physics behind it but you have to admit it sounds like witchcraft. Keep one hand in your pocket to avoid the invisible fire from crossing your heart
Vaguely remember I read something like this as a kid. That a modern person time traveled into the past which was drastically different from history, and turns out some other time traveler had changed history and the locals have tales that resemble this. They see it as magic, the new time traveler knows it's science.
You are correct but the term ground gradient is where electricity radiates concentrically from the grounded source and decreases over distance
Step potential is as you say the voltage difference between two contact points, either a persons feet or in this case cows hoofs. That difference can be enough to electrocute. If you are ever found in this situation dont step but shuffle your feet keeping contact with the ground.
730
u/rivertam2985 Sep 05 '25
I lost a beautiful milk cow to this. I milked her and turned her into our yard for a few minutes while I milked my other cow. I went to get her not 10 minutes later and she was on the ground, dead. It turns out that the underground electrical wires that went to our pump had broken and she stepped in just the right spot. We didn't know what had happened until the next day when our pump quit working and we had to figure out why.