While it’s said that lightning never strikes the same place twice, it definitely doesn’t apply to farms, as a Texas farmstead got hit by lightning multiple times. In quite a literally shocking situation, Reddit user FluffyDinosaur321 said she woke up to find her hay bale charred and smoking after being struck by lightning. Luckily, it was her neighbors who spotted the smoke first and quickly informed her before anything got out of hand.
“We were definitely lucky,” remarked FluffyDinosaur321, as the ground had been wet from all the rain, meaning the moisture could have spared the entire field from catching fire. Still, there wasn’t much left of the hay bale after the farmer cut and scraped out the burnt, unusable parts.
On the bright side, “[It’s] Better the bale than a cow, I suppose. Glad you caught it in time to prevent a bigger fire,” optimistically wrote a commenter. To many people’s surprise, FluffyDinosaur321 responded, saying that this wasn’t the first time her farm had experienced a lightning attack. “We have actually had 2 cows struck before,” she recalled.
The Texas Farmer Claims the Cows Weren’t Suitable for Eating After Being Killed by Lightning
For those morbidly curious, the cows didn’t explode like something out of a cartoon. Instead, “just the hooves flew off and legs straight out,” OP explained. As to whether the rest of the cow was salvageable for edible meat, FluffyDinosaur321 didn’t believe that to be the case, claiming it was an issue with the Health and Human Services. “Would not risk it personally,” she advised.
“Thank goodness you didn’t have a bunch of them stacked up. Better to lose one than a couple hundred or whatever,” remarked a Redditor. “If it makes you feel better, my neighbor’s field caught on fire. It’s a big field, and it was almost all of it,” mourned another user.
Among the tens of thousands of Redditors who upvoted the Texas farmer’s post, one user’s remark likely resonated with how a good majority were thinking. “It might be infuriating but it’s kinda cool to look at for the average person,” they wrote. Based on how unsurprised FluffyDinosaur321 reacted to this whole situation, a lightning strike on one’s farm appears to be less of a ‘shock’ for those in the farming business. But hay, that’s just part of the job.
