Cow Flipping: Animal Shooting Photo Draws Complaints

By: Joe Strupp When two escaped cows in Danville, Pa., were shot to death by local police Tuesday morning, Editor Len Ingrassia of The Daily Item in nearby Sunbury was sure it was a Page One story.

And when he saw the images captured by Photographer Robert Inglis -- including a clear photo of an officer firing a lethal shot at one of the bovine -- that left no doubt where the photo would go.

"That was the most compelling photo," said Ingrassia, who also edits the afternoon Danville News, a sister publication. "And to run anything else would not seem to be serving the reader."

But after the Wednesday paper was published, with the shooting image on Page One, the Daily Item was the subject of nearly three-dozen complaints, Ingrassia said. Among those were several people who threatened to cancel their subscriptions to the 25,000-circulation daily if such an image were printed in the future.

"It is the graphic image of the photo," Ingrassia said. "That is what they were complaining about. Someone said 'look at it from a Third Grader's perspective' and 'how would it look to a five-year-old to look at it? What do you tell them?'"

Ingrassia said he listened to the complaints and tried to explain to readers that the news value of the image made it worthy of the front page. "It was discussed," he said about the question of placing it so prominently on Page One, but with little resistance.

Inglis also defended the image, noting, "it didn't have any blood or guts in the actual photo. It wasn't too graphic."

The incident began Tuesday morning in Danville when two cows escaped from a trailer while being transported, the Danville News reported. Police reportedly tried to corral them for more than an hour, but chose to shoot both, the paper said.

Inglis snapped photos of the incident, two of which were used prominently in the News and the Daily Item, both of which are owned by Community Newspaper Holdings Inc.

The photos included one image of police seeking to catch the cows as they roamed a creek, while the other was the clear photo of Danville Police Officer Jerry Zeidler shooting one of the cows with a rifle.

The shot of police in the creek was placed on Page One of the Danville News, an afternoon daily that published around noon Wednesday, while the shooting photo made the front page of The Daily Item, a morning paper that distributed earlier in the day.

The Danville News also used the shooting image, but inside, according to Assistant Managing Editor Bill Bowman. "I think we wanted to get a different image out there," Bowman said about the decision not to use the shooting photo on Page One.

The Web version of the story had received no reader comments as of 3 p.m. Wednesday and Bowman said the shooting itself had received little local opposition in the community because the cows appeared to be more dangerous than people believed. He said they had knocked over their owner and had been running free near a middle school. "I don't know how many more options they had," he said.

Police also had received permission from the owner to kill the cows, editors said, adding that they were on their way to be auctioned for slaughter anyway.

Ingrassia said the paper planned to run a follow-up article on Thursday about community reaction to the use of deadly force on the animals instead of tranquilizers. He also said the paper would run an editorial the same day explaining its decision to run the photos. "It will be more of an explanation," he said.