My experience with petting cows was me slowly walking past a row of maybe 50 feeding cows at a farm and petting their heads/noses one by one. Wasn't a fan of the smell burning my nose (ammonia buildup?), but it was funny and heartwarming to observe how much their reactions varied from cow to cow. Some of them were merely curious, some instantly caught on to the headpats and seemed to demand more, some started licking my hand, some were nervous or frightened and shifted back from my hand, they didn't let themselves get pet at all... In a single row of cows you could witness a whole kaleidoscope of personalities. And yet they still had traits common to all of them, such as that none of them were aggressive in the sense that they'd try to bite my hand or similar (well, a few tried to chew it, but that stemmed from curiosity rather than anger).
I guess that being afraid of them is natural, considering how big and heavy they are. It's true that a cow in theory has the strength to kill a grown man with ease. But consider that they're prey animals by nature, further bred for docility, and you get huge scaredy softies either unaware or reluctant of their might. There's something profoundly philosophical to it that I find really fascinating and sad actually. You have up to hundreds of these huge creatures per farm, each of them up to a ton in weight or more, each of them capable of ending a human pushing them around, if they ever set their minds to it. It certainly is within their brain's physical capacity to do. Yet they almost never do. They let themselves be treated like trash, or outright openly murdered, and so often they just don't even seem to care that there's a covert predator visiting them day to day, whose hands both feed and kill. My mind goes back to how politicians treat people in modern society and how for so many of us our position is barely different from the cows.
I often think about whether such a thing as a cattle uprising would ever be possible. What would it be like if every cow and bull somehow magically decided that they've had enough with humans? I'm reminiscing of a very nasty and miserable novel, Cows by Matt Stokoe, that devotes half of itself to a cattle uprising (and to stay on our own topic, includes even a few scenes of bestiality).
