Forget Shark Week, Cow Week Is Here

Maggie Koerth-Baker was astounded when she learned that cows actually kill more people than sharks—27 times more people, at least between 2003 and 2008. It made her think about "the way we talk about sharks" and "the way we think about risk," she writes on Boing Boing. "Cows sneak in under our cultural radar—they kill effectively and relatively often, while we save up all our terror for the much, much less deadly shark."

So, since Shark Week started on the Discovery Channel Sunday, she's decided to provide some counterbalance in the form of … Cow Week. She's highlighting one cow-related death every day until Saturday. (Today's case involves a farmer in Ireland who intervened when one of his cows turned on his son; the cow kicked him several times and he died.) Koerth-Baker stresses that she's not making light of incidents like this; she just wants "to get us all thinking about how we assign risk to certain situations." (More cow stories.)