Why would the weight of the cow affect its terminal velocity? It's the drag that determines it, not the weight. The remarks about density seem more relevant than free-fall.

Cows are a lot heavier than humans, so they might survive debris that kills a human. Or their deaths are just not counted because nobody cares.

@WeatherVane in a first approximation it's weight by surface area. While the weight increases with the volume (I think it's ok to assume that cows and humans have about the same density) which grows by the cube, surface area only grows by the square. So it's probably reasonable to assume that the terminal velocity of a cow is higher than that of a human.

@gnasher729 A cow might be tougher than a human, but would be unlikely to survive being dropped from any significant height. To quote biologist J.B.S. Haldane: "You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes." Cows and horses being of similar size, I imagine it does not end well for them either.

It's been known for a vehicle to be gently set down unharmed, so the cows could get lucky and stroll away too.

and I don't know about the forces involved in spinning objects within the tornado, but is the cow picked up and thrown, or does it literally rotate around the tornado's axis?

Doing a search for the terminal velocity of a cow shows it likely to be between 173 and 273 mph. prezi.com/hs7-e9rmmwmx/…. and obsidianfields.com/lj/fallingcow.pdf

You wrote 'cars are low density' (relative to cows) which was against my intuition seeing that a car is mostly metal. A cow like any animal has a density of around 1 kg/l or t/m^3 as it is mostly water. After some googling a car has a volume of around 8 to 10 m^3 and a weight of 1 to1.5 tonnes resulting in a density in the range of 0.1 to 0.2 t/m^3 so you are correct. Cars do have much lower density than cows.

@quarague Cars are not "mostly metal". They're mostly air, it's just metal on the outside. You can comfortably fit 5 humans inside an average car. You'd be hard-pressed to fit even 1 human inside a cow.

@DarrelHoffman "Outside of a cow, a book is man's best friend. Inside a cow, it's too dark to read."

A cow could conceivably get swept up by a large piece of siding or similar debris and ride it through air flying-carpet-style. If it gets separated from the debris while airborne, you'd briefly have your flying cow. If it stays with the debris, it may even get a soft landing. I could even see livestock that takes shelter in a barn getting swept up en masse.

@DoctorDestructo: I wonder if most "human carried by tornado" incidents are via "magic carpets" such as this (non-tornadic) example: youtube.com/watch?v=DomHEUNJF7M There is a LOT of debris generated when a house is destroyed.

@DarrelHoffman "A man is broken". As in "A man is dead, and broken"? Falling down from ~1km would probably kill humans with a 99.999% chance.

@EricDuminil Note that the previous line says the rat is killed. Saying the man is broken is adding to this, the man will have broken bones that will alter his shape.

@EricDuminil Take it up with the late Mr. Haldane; I was just quoting him. But as Loren Pechtel said, the man being dead in addition to broken is implied. I guess adding another word for the sake of precision interrupts the poetic flow of the sentence. Note that the splashing horse is also quite dead, and also broken, but I don't think that needed to be specified.

I think this video is a better example than the one in the question. The title claims that it shows cows getting "sucked up" into a tornado, and the video does indeed show a large tornado coming into contact with a herd of cattle. However, I've watched it several times at half speed in 1080p and I'm not seeing any evidence that any of the cows get "sucked up".

While a car might be low-density because it has open space, by design, for passengers and their stuff, along with room for comfort, the same can't be said for trucks. If you have a trailer filled with cargo, or a tanker filled with liquid, the overall density of the truck pulling and the trailer with cargo is going to be pretty high, isn't it?

@PoloHoleSet obviously, it is the empty trucks which get lifted. Cows always have the same density, but perhaps a methane-bloated cow is ready for lift-off.

There are reasons to doubt this can be easily observed, but not for the reasons you've stated. EF5 tornadoes can rip concrete buildings, but the flying bits are small chunks and dust. So the tornado would have to be in a pretty narrow range to lift a cow without breaking it into small chunks and the proverbial fine red mist. Also, EF5 tornadoes besides being rare are hard to watch from close enough to see details on the granularity of cows.

And aside, it's possible at least for a human to fall from a tornado at something other than deadly velocity even after travelling hundreds of feet horizontally youtube.com/watch?v=2_yHFimyRSM So that part of your theory is also wrong.

Here's freight train turned to its side by a tornado click2houston.com/news/local/2023/01/24/… res.cloudinary.com/graham-media-group/image/upload/f_auto/…

Also container train blown off a bridge by a tornado. Some of the containers were clearly not empty. abqjournal.com/1291493/… d21yqjvcoayho7.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/13/…

Similar train tipping event by tornado rtands.com/rail-news/…