Crazed Canadian Cow Killed
Toronto police were forced to shoot a belligerent cow after it rampaged through the city for four hours. The cow was set loose following an accident and the police tried for some four hours to capture the animal before it charged and the officer who found himself in the animal's path was forced to shoot.
The steer injured two people and repeatedly charged at police after a trailer carrying it and several other cows flipped over on a freeway, Ontario Provincial Police Constable Dave Woodford told reporters.
After four hours of trying to corral the 1,000-pound (450-kilogram) animal, an officer finally took it down for safety reasons, using his service revolver, he said.
"We were following this cow that was running in the main streets of the (suburban neighborhood) and all of a sudden it turned and started charging at the officer," said Woodford.
"He just pulled his handgun out and started shooting at it. It would be like a car coming at you, that's what it would be like," he said, adding that the officer fired more than a dozen bullets at the steer.
"Service revolver." Brilliant reporting. The Toronto police use - as many police departments do - Glock 22's or 23's. Which explains the firing of more than a dozen bullets. (The Glock is a pistol, not a revolver.)
Animals, World news | Gaius Thursday, 20 March , 2008
By Bob, Friday, 21 March , 2008 @ 6:01 am
Actually, the Glock is an AUTOMATIC pistol. Pistol is the generic term for any hand gun.
By feeblemind, Friday, 21 March , 2008 @ 7:25 am
You guys noticed the part about the firearm. First thing I noticed was that the animal was both a cow and a steer.
By HB, Friday, 21 March , 2008 @ 9:42 am
The police should have requested someone, be it a wildlife officer or even the Humane Society or SPCA, to bring them a tranquilizer gun. That steer did not need to go through a three-hour nerve-wrecking chase before being showered with bullets. The OPP was extremely inept. Well, this is Canada after all, where the animal cruelty laws are a century old and animals are considered “property”. Pretty civilized, eh?
By Mockinbird, Friday, 21 March , 2008 @ 2:41 pm
I hope that the meat will go to an orphanage or similar institution.
By Gaius, Friday, 21 March , 2008 @ 5:49 pm
Actually, Bob, the "automatic" is misleading. It is a self-loading or autoloading semiautomatic pistol. To a shooter, the terms pistol and revolver are not generally interchangeable. Mostly we use the term handgun as the general term.
By martian, Saturday, 22 March , 2008 @ 12:23 pm
Wow! Since we’re getting so technical I’ll point out that the difference between an "automatic" and "semi-automatic" weapon is the number of bullets that are fired when one pulls the trigger. An "automatic" weapon can fire off its entire clip (for those who don’t know much about guns, the clip is what holds the bullets prior to firing on pretty much all "automatic" and "semi-automatic" weapons) on a single pull of the trigger - you just point the weapon in the direction you want to fire, pull back the trigger and hold it and it hoses down your target with lead. In contrast, a "semi-automatic" weapon fires one bullet for each pull of the trigger. In this case the "automatic" part of the weapon description refers to the way the spent cartridges are discarded - the gun spits it out on its own immediatly after the bullet is fired. This is as opposed to guns like revolvers where the spent cartridge stays in the cylinder until someone opens the cylinder and empties it manually.
By Gaius, Saturday, 22 March , 2008 @ 12:38 pm
The correct term is ‘magazine’. A clip (properly a ’stripper clip’) is something else entirely.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stripper_clip
By martian, Saturday, 22 March , 2008 @ 12:55 pm
Gaius, you are absolutley right. I was so busy thinking abnout explaining the difference between "auto" and "semi-auto" that I fell into the very common but errouneous habit of using the terms "clip" and "magazine" interchangeably - they are not the same thing. However, a "stripper clip" is just one type of clip. There are also "En-bloc" clips, "moon clips" and "half moon clips" used for loading different types of weapons and depending on whether the magazine is removable, fixed, or certain cylinder type magazines like the British Webley Revolver.