Cow Magnets

April 9, 2024 10:36 AM

What is a cow magnet? Have you ever heard of this type of magnet? Actually, cow magnets are very popular with farmers, ranchers, and veterinarians since they are a well-known method of preventing hardware disease in cattle. So what’s hardware disease? An informational page from Stanford Magnets.
posted by hippybear (51 comments total)

Ee-yew.
posted by y2karl at 10:46 AM on April 9 [1 favorite]

Cows are weird, man.
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:52 AM on April 9 [3 favorites]

Ruminating about ruminants, man....
posted by mightshould at 11:05 AM on April 9

Cow magnets are cool! I've used one for years to locate wall studs -- just tape some string to the cow magnet and run it slowly against a wall until it's attracted to a fastener.

You could do this with any decently strong magnet, but a cow magnet lends itself to the task really, really well
posted by hoboscratch at 11:10 AM on April 9 [5 favorites]

These magnets are slipped into soft, two-part, silicone covers -- about the size of a champagne cork.

At Scout camp in the 1980s, a troop of boys from rural Wisconsin made blow guns from electrical conduit, and blew the silicone covers as the "bullets." They would leap out of the underbrush and ambush you in a hail of gentle, pink ammunition.

Even then it was pretty funny.
posted by wenestvedt at 11:15 AM on April 9 [5 favorites]

I was going to post a joke involving fistulated cows, but it's way creepy (and possibly animal abuse) so don't google it
posted by AzraelBrown at 11:16 AM on April 9

While the resultant mass of iron remains in the cow’s rumen as a pseudobezoar (an intentionally introduced bezoar), it does not cause the severe problems of hardware disease. Cow magnets cannot be passed through a cow’s 4th bonivial meta-colon.

Woof, for a second there I thought this was slipping into Star Trek/Doctor Who-style technobabble.
posted by ejs at 11:32 AM on April 9 [3 favorites]

My grandmother made these at a factory on the west side of Chicago, I wish I could remember the name. But we always had a few lying around to play with when we visited. Totally forgot about all of this until just now, thanks!
posted by JoeZydeco at 11:32 AM on April 9 [2 favorites]

I had one for years, the plastic coating had broken thus was not usable. Best magnet ever! Very strong with rounded ends. Had been in the tummies of numerous Herefords.
posted by sammyo at 11:57 AM on April 9 [1 favorite]

Only the pure of heart can pass through the 4th bonivial meta-colon.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 12:03 PM on April 9 [21 favorites]

grazin' magnets, how do they work?
posted by chavenet at 12:11 PM on April 9 [2 favorites]

Cattle commonly swallow foreign objects, because they do not use their lips to discriminate between materials and they do not completely chew their feed before swallowing.

OK FINE, I'll eat slower. Geez.
posted by PlusDistance at 12:11 PM on April 9 [8 favorites]

I just had never heard of such a thing before. I don't even know how I came across it.

I grew up in a city with an ag university and my home was bike-riding distance from the field with the fistulated cows. As a free range child of the Seventies, I saw many things a child that age should never see.
posted by hippybear at 12:18 PM on April 9 [4 favorites]

Imagining a cow that's irate about this: "So you fed me a big 'ole magnet when I was a kid that's stuck now in my stomach FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE because you thought I MIGHT eat a nail someday?!?"
posted by straight at 12:24 PM on April 9 [1 favorite]

I'm surprised "cow magnets" wasn't the subject of a Far Side cartoon.
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:43 PM on April 9 [10 favorites]

Only the pure of heart can pass through the 4th bonivial meta-colon.

Only on a high moral fiber diet can they squeeze through.
posted by y2karl at 12:53 PM on April 9 [3 favorites]

There was a "craze" in the 1980s where by doing some sort of magic with cow magnets your car would suddenly get 100MPG. (It's, ah, bullshit, as you can imagine.)
posted by maxwelton at 1:02 PM on April 9 [1 favorite]

I'm surprised "cow magnets" wasn't the subject of a Far Side cartoon.

See, part of crafting a quality FPP is knowing that one COULD work such a joke into the text of the FPP itself, but realizing that leaving that opportunity for someone else is a golden gift of friendship.
posted by hippybear at 1:07 PM on April 9 [10 favorites]

You're a better man than I am - I doubt I could have resisted such temptation.
posted by Greg_Ace at 1:14 PM on April 9 [2 favorites]

Cow magnets are the best magnets, so strong! When I was growing up, I don't remember my parents ever actually giving any to the cows, but we always had several on the fridge. The round ones would be stacked on top of squarer ones so they wouldn't rolllll down onto the floor.
posted by esoterrica at 1:46 PM on April 9 [1 favorite]

How much time was spent deliberately rollllling the round ones down the fridge? Did you hold races? These are important questions.
posted by Greg_Ace at 2:19 PM on April 9 [1 favorite]

I thought this was slipping into Star Trek/Doctor Who-style technobabble.

I'm pretty sure it is! The words "bonivial" and "meta-colon" (in a cow context) only appear on magnet marketing sites and on social media sites talking about cow magnets. Someone made up these sci-fi words and then they got copied by various magnet vendors.
posted by moonmilk at 3:06 PM on April 9 [1 favorite]

Bonivial... like, they are bovines right? So that should be "bovinial"?
posted by hippybear at 3:12 PM on April 9 [4 favorites]

When I was a freshman in college, my roommate was a guy from Wisconsin. We had a mini-fridge, like you do, and one day these super powerful magnets appeared.

"Rich," I asked, testing how much force it took to remove one of these torpedo-shaped magnets from the fridge. "What the hell is this?"

"It's a cow magnet," said Rich, who proceeded to explain that his dad was a veterinary pathologist and had brought these home from work. "They're really strong."

They were indeed.
posted by RakDaddy at 3:19 PM on April 9 [1 favorite]

So that should be "bovinial"?

I had that thought too! Unfortunately "bovinial" also does not appear to be a real word, but at least it's closer!
posted by moonmilk at 3:20 PM on April 9 [3 favorites]

I remember seeing these for sale in the Efstonscience catalogue.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 4:06 PM on April 9

TIL, indeed. Chalk up another "cows are whimsical in so many ways" win! Er...whimsical in the sense that they don't really know that they are walking around with a magnet inside, nor do they care.
posted by davidmsc at 4:24 PM on April 9

"So you fed me a big 'ole magnet when I was a kid that's stuck now in my stomach FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE because you thought I MIGHT eat a nail someday?!?"

This seems to me like it would become an SNL skit, in which we discover that the objecting cow has eaten 12 nails.
posted by jenfullmoon at 4:34 PM on April 9 [3 favorites]

Had been in the tummies of numerous Herefords.

Wait, so after the cow dies they chop it out and reuse it?
posted by Literaryhero at 4:34 PM on April 9

I assume it is discovered during the butchering process. I doubt they attack the corpse with an axe and the Find My app open on their phone.
posted by hippybear at 4:44 PM on April 9 [4 favorites]

So that's why tractor beams work so well on cows. They're already magnetic.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 4:48 PM on April 9 [11 favorites]

Digging up a comment I made in 2008 (Because it's the only instance of the phrase Google could find!) cow magnets interact with bovinity flux rays so that a herd of cows in a field face the same direction.
posted by plastic_animals at 5:22 PM on April 9 [4 favorites]

That's only if they go to Bovinity School and get moordained.
posted by Greg_Ace at 5:36 PM on April 9 [11 favorites]

MetaFilter: they do not use their lips to discriminate between materials and they do not completely chew their feed before swallowing

Also,
MetaFilter:Meta-colon
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:20 PM on April 9 [2 favorites]

Grew up on a dairy farm, so used to play with cow magnets as a kid. Much fun.
posted by fings at 6:32 PM on April 9

Like, dairy farms just have them lying around? Are they kept in mason jars like how screws and nuts and bolts might be in a garage?
posted by hippybear at 6:34 PM on April 9

I was going to post a joke involving fistulated cows, but it's way creepy (and possibly animal abuse)...

I don't think joking about fistulated cows would be animal abuse. Unless it wasn't a funny joke.

Fistulated critters were part of my ag science courses in collage. Mainly cows, but sheep, and horses, too. The critters live normal lives and appear to be quite happy. One or two were fistulated when they developed severe bloat and would have died otherwise, and it's great to have an animal that positively volunteers to have a cannula put in. There has been of crapton of good things coming out of research done with fistulated animals.

In developed countries, Crohn disease is the most common cause of spontaneous fistula formation [in people.] While it doesn't seem to bother fistulated cows, people have a significant reduction in quality of life. If we can make their lives better with research from fistulated, but otherwise contented critters, I'm all for it.
posted by BlueHorse at 6:39 PM on April 9 [3 favorites]

Ours were kept in a cabinet in the barn, along with other cow medicines. The (used) plastic syringes for treating mastitis were also fun to play with, we'd wash them out and use them as water pistols.
posted by fings at 6:43 PM on April 9 [1 favorite]

And I think in undeveloped countries fistula is often experienced by women who suffer under extremely long labor and there ends up a hole being worn between the vaginal canal and the bladder. This is a really horrible fate for a lot of these women who end up being cast out because they leak urine and maybe feces and so they smell bad. It often ends their social lives. I remember hearing a documentary on BBC World Service about someone who goes in to communities and finds women who are segregating outside of community because they suffer from obstetric fistula and have no recourse. And this person works with a program that brings these women to surgeons who will fix their problems and transform their lives.

This isn't that story, but this is one person's story.

I wasn't expecting to go there with this thread, but here we are.
posted by hippybear at 6:47 PM on April 9 [4 favorites]

This piece from Beef Magazine goes into a bit more detail about hardware disease and how the metal gets into the cow in the first place.

If you're wondering what they look like after use, this paper has some low rez but very informative images of a ceramic cage cow magnet after retrieval from buffaloes.
posted by Jilder at 7:11 PM on April 9 [1 favorite]

Surely those would be, by definition, buffalo magnets?
posted by hippybear at 7:26 PM on April 9 [1 favorite]

I'm surprised "cow magnets" wasn't the subject of a Far Side cartoon.

Cow Tools
posted by clavdivs at 8:26 PM on April 9 [1 favorite]

OMG Jokes aren't funny if you have to explain them!
posted by hippybear at 8:53 PM on April 9

How strong are these magnets when compared to harddisk magnets? Those are the strong magnets I'm used to. Be careful when you're handling more than one, because it's really easy to get the skin on your fingertips pinched between them.
posted by Too-Ticky at 11:47 PM on April 9

Ok, this fun fact will be unleashed on my kids as well come dinnertime. The magnet are really cheap as well, unfortunately the local feed supply does not keep them in stock, otherwise I would have brought one home.
posted by Harald74 at 1:18 AM on April 10

“Bovinial”? Not buying it.

(Well… maybe. I do buy magnets….)
posted by pompomtom at 3:04 AM on April 10

Finally I have my explanation for why all the cows in any paddock I drive past are always pointing in the same direction.
posted by flabdablet at 4:36 AM on April 10 [2 favorites]

I wasn’t aware of hardware disease until a few years ago when a local farm sued the local telecom provider after the former’s cows ate metal left behind by the subcontractors installing fiber optic cable.
posted by terrapin at 4:56 AM on April 10 [2 favorites]

I remember the "put cow magnets on your fuel lines to increase MPG" craze; this may be the origin story.
posted by achrise at 7:56 AM on April 10 [2 favorites]

OMG Jokes aren't funny if you have to explain them!

Perhaps clavdivs was simply attempting to refresh our memories that Metafilter's own bondcliff has been gloriously immortalized in that Wikipedia article.
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:22 AM on April 10

I know about these because Jessamyn used to use them as a metaphor in her MeFi bio...
posted by ersatzkat at 1:18 PM on April 10