I guy I knew cut a cow completely in half on a motorcycle, was thrown off his bike, hit a second cow with his body, and killed that one too. He only just barely survived.

Thats... amazing...

Cows are delicious

...That is the most horrible thing I have ever heard.




My 8th grade science teacher told us a story about how she had roadkill in her freezer and it exploded. I don't remember what she did with them, but she would just pick up roadkill and keep it.




That's disgusting, but hilariously so. I honestly think I would be scarred for life if that happened to me. I love animals

I might be asking for more detail than I'm prepared for, but how do you cut a cow completely in half with a motorcycle?

A motorcycle with a machete attached to it, obviously.

Actually in my curiosity I found this..
http://www.videovat.com/videos/2325/motorc...rough-deer.aspx

It's a deer but...same principle I suppose. (Don't worry, it's blurry and not too gory looking)

Hmm. I'm still not sold. The video's pretty unclear.

I'm not saying it couldn't happen. It's just hard for me to imagine a motorcycle slicing through the middle of a cow.

Unless it's one of those machete-motorcycles you mentioned.

I asked Jeeves, "Can a motorcycle cut through a cow?" but his responses were vague. Looks like experimentation is the only way to settle this.

Yeah.. pretty much. He was going waaay too fast down a dirt road at night and some farmer was moving his cows across the road. A bike going 70+ is a pretty nasty projectile, and if he had hit the ground rather than another cow, he'd have been dead too. But instead he like flipped over, his back hit the cow's stomach, which cushioned the blow for him, but basically turned the cow's interior into mush. If I recall he still broke his back and a few ribs though.

Spread it all over the internets, so Mythbusters will do it. If it doesn't work, they'll just blow up a cow (or cow-shaped ballistics gel), which is still cool.

This just reinforces my reluctance to drive fast on country roads.

They're not allowed to hurt animals... though I suppose they could just use a pig like in that one episode.. or just some sides of beef.

Hmm. That's actually a good idea!

I don't know if the story is true, all I know is the guy was in the hospital with a broken back and his bike was covered in blood, and that was the story he told.

I dunno though, the physics of it seem sound. A bike is fairly narrow, so with its weight, plus the persons, multiplied by the velocity, the amount of force being applied to a rather small area of cow is going to be pretty intense. Not only that, but there's the fact that cows aren't exactly made of much stuff that isn't squishy.

The ribs would definitely break. I'm not sure about the spine, but if the two halves of the cow were only connected by the spine, I'd call that cutting in half.

Spine is only held together by cartilage though, its not solid bone or anything. A human can tear a disk in their back just by lifting something heavy or falling at an awkward angle. So I think all the internal organs would provide more resistance than the spine.

I dunno, tearing a disk is much more minor then completely severing a spine. Especially since I imagine a cow's spine is even tougher then a human's.

I don't believe that video. Well, at least that it's a deer. There's zero blood and some sort of flying stiff shrapnel doing a 720 turn in the air.

Just me, or was there nothing on the road for the guy to hit?

Yeah, it more looks like the "deer" exploded, which is even LESS of a motivation to hit one, in my book.

@SAW: Right, I'm not trying to make a definitive statement that it couldn't happen, because I really don't know that it couldn't, and I'm sure if you hit a cow going fast on a motorcycle, both of you are bound for some serious injuries, no matter what. It's the slicing in half part I'm having trouble with. Even with a lot of internal trauma and broken bones, it's just hard for me to envision a motorcycle cutting a cow in half. Like, I wonder how fast a sheet of metal would have to be traveling for its edge slice through a cow. In order for a motorcycle to do it, which is fairly wide and blunt by comparison, I imagine it'd have to be going a lot faster than that.

I guess I could more easily imagine the cow being broken -around- the motorcycle, and I guess if the force were great enough, I could imagine the break being started on the -other- side of the cow. Kind of like when you break a stick in your hands. Even that, though, seems like it would require a lot.

OR somebody else could have already sliced through most of the cow before your friend got there.

I'm glad this topic has generated so much discussion, though. Maybe we should have a contest for the first person to come up with compelling evidence that a cow could or could not be sliced through with a motorcycle, with a bonus if it turns out that cows actually explode in such an impact.

Well, I don't think it'd have to be all that fast actually. I mean, much less than 70mph anyway. That deer my brother hit, the reason it was so traumatic for him was because the deer flipped up into the air and hit a road sign which sliced it's legs off.

Now, granted, deer legs aren't as thick as a cow torso, but at the same time, they're more solid... if only cause a cow torso is hollow and filled with gushy innards where as a leg is all solid muscle and bone.

I think that it's the thought of 'sliced in half' that's creating a difficult visual. Imagine it more as torn in two by the force than sliced in two. Slicing implies a clean seperation... and I'm willing to bet it wasn't.

I really imagine it would depend on where the cow was hit and how fast the guy was going and possibly what model of bike he was on. But don't doubt it happened, if only cause... why would the dude in the hospital with the broken back and ribs lie about something like that? Especially if there was a witness - which I'm assuming the farmer taking his cows across the road saw it happen.

Well, lets see. F = m*v. Lets say the total weight of bike+rider = 600 pounds, and the bike was going 70 miles an hour and upon hitting the cow.

That results in a force of 8,516.5 k-m/s

A .45 caliber bullet weighs 14.9 grams and travels at 830 feet per second.

That results in a force of just 3.769 k-m/s

So, since we know a .45 will probably tear into a cow pretty good, I would say that a motorcycle would do the job pretty effectively too.

What do I win?

A .45 caliber bullet and a motorcycle are of entirely different sizes, though, so wouldn't that affect the answer as well?

<- Not good at physics