Safety warning over cow 'booping' craze

THE pursuit of the perfect social media image or video for likes is increasingly putting people at risk around farm and wild animals, campaigners have warned.

- By Steph Spyro ENVIRONMENT EDITOR

The Countryside Alliance said there was a "worrying trend" of people acting dangerously for content to share online.

It has called for more to be done to protect both animals and the public from potentially risky encounters by updating the code which governs how we should behave while in the great outdoors.

David Bean, the organisations's government relations manager, said: "My fiancée and I were visiting some highland cattle at a petting farm in Fife when the farmer warned us against touching the cattle on the nose. She told us she had had trouble with people trying to 'boop' her cows for the sake of videos to be posted to social media, not realising that the concentration of nerve endings in a cow's nose make it highly sensitive.