Here at Hooting Yard we are, as you know, ever vigilant for news of lethal or otherwise miscreant cows. We could not fail to take note of the alarming tale of the Brazilian man killed by a cow falling through his roof.

Elsewhere, though it is hardly “news”, we learn from a list of children detained in a Worcestershire insane asylum between 1854 and 1900 that one poor little tot was there because he or she was “frightened by a cow”. Whatever terrors the cow may have provoked pale beside an entry further down the list, which tells us that another mite was placed in the asylum after “being put inside a recently killed pig”. To which one can only respond with a blood-curdling “eek!”.