The science goes like this: in your standard tale of cow tippery, a young buck with chicanery in his heart will sneak into a field, find a cow that has fallen asleep standing up, and assert physical dominance over nature by pushing said bovine over. But according to the study, a roughly 150 pound person would need to exert about 1,400 Newtons of force to overturn a 1,500 pound cow. That’s around twice as much force as your standard human being could put out, and it assumes that the cow would abandon all sense of self preservation and just sort of go with the flow. 

That amount of effort would be tantamount to pushing over a small car, according to journalist Jake Swearingen in a 2013 NPR interview. Swearingen brings up another excellent point for anyone skeptical of the skepticism surrounding cow tipping: it’s pretty impossible to find a clip of a cow being successfully tipped over on YouTube, which he aptly describes as “the clearinghouse of human stupidity.” There’s not much in the world of bad choices that doesn’t make it to the world of streaming video. In essence, pics or it didn’t happen.