A lightning strike killed 19 cows this week during a Texas storm, KLTV reported.
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“All of a sudden, a lightning bolt came down and the cows just fell”, he explained. He described how he watched as one lightning bolt hit the herd “in the blink of an eye”. Victor Benson saw it happen.
Nearly 20 cows were killed instantly by a single bolt of lightning.
Some animals managed to get up and stumbled away, but most were killed outright.
Jensenius said that this probably resulted in causing cardiac arrest in the reindeer although it was possible that the bolt hit one or two of the beasts. Benson said he called the owners, the Anderson family. In fact, she said her husband, who has worked around cattle his whole life, has never seen anything like it. “Just kind of surreal to see it”, farm owner Ashley Anderson told WSFA news.
The Andersons say while this is a significant loss, they don’t plan to do anything differently with their cows. “It’s just a freak thing; I mean they were just staying out of the rain”, Anderson told WSFA.
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Considering that cows live in wide-open fields and tend to hide under trees, a farmer losing cows to a lightning storm seems to be a pretty common occurrence. They said they gave them to people who were able to use them for meat.
