A video, which quite frankly looks like a scene out of an eerie apocalyptic film, has emerged showing a line of cows who were found dead along a fence.
Bobby Woody III, who works as a rancher in northeast Texas, has shared the gruesome discovery he made ‘a few days’ after a lightning storm in late August.
The rancher says he found fifteen cows and eight calves dead on his farm, which is just outside Annona, last month.
You can watch the full video here:
As per the Metro, he said:
Each cow had burns on its stomach, showing how strong the voltage was.
The footage shows each of the lifeless cows lying next to the fence, with one in the middle of the field away from the others, which Woody claims was a result of the storm’s power.
Writing on Facebook, he explained:
When the lightening hit, it had such a strong voltage, it basically jolted one cow in the middle of the field.
Woody went on to say the incident was one of the ‘wildest and craziest’ things he’d ever seen.
It’s likely that the lightning struck the fence, causing the electricity to jump, looking for a body to travel through, electrocuting the animals.
This isn’t the first time a large group of cows have been killed by storms in the southern state. In August 2016, 19 cows were killed in east Texas while sheltering under a tree during a storm.
It’s believed lightning struck the tree and the cows fell to the ground, according to reports in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
That same month, 323 reindeer were found dead over the water in a national park in Norway. Like the cows, officials believe they were huddled together during a severe thunderstorm and the animals were killed by lightning, National Geographic reports.
As per the Telegraph the odds of being struck by lightning are approximately 1 in 576,000 and the chance of actually being killed by lightning is about 1 in 2,320,000.
However, people are advised to avoid working or playing in an open field during a storm, which would make sense as to why so many farm animals fall victim to lightning strikes.
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Emma Rosemurgey is an NCTJ trained Journalist who started her career by producing The Royal Rosemurgey newspaper in 2004, which kept her family up to date with the goings on of her sleepy north east village. She graduated from the University of Central Lancashire in Preston and started her career in regional newspapers before joining Tyla (formerly Pretty 52) in 2017, and progressing onto UNILAD in 2019.