Friday Funny: Here's Where Cows Could Take Over the United States

This bit of imaginative explanation by Zachary Crockett asks readers to imagine the results of hypothetical military coup, perpetrated by the nation's cows.

To set the scary but amusing doomsday scenario in motion, Crockett points out the obvious size advantage of cows (i.e., "the wide-eyed, cantankerous varmints outweigh us [Americans] by 66 billion pounds") and their tendency toward violence (i.e., "they maul about 20 of us [Americans] to death each year").

The larger point of the article is to illustrate how much of the country is populated more with bovine than brethren. True, there is one cow for every 3.5 humans in the United States, but there are nine states where humans are easily outnumbered by cows.

Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Wyoming all have more cows than humans. Nebraska has the largest population of cows, with 6.4 million, and a 3.4 to 1 ratio of cows to humans. South Dakota has the largest ratio of cows to human, 4.5 to 1. The article also includes infographics to illustrate these statistics and come fun cow GIFs, if you're into that sort of thing. Also included is a brief history of how so many of the nation's cows came to reside in the Great Plains.