Stampede
act of mass impulse among herd of animals or a crowd of people
A stampede () is a situation in which a group of large animals start suddenly running in the same direction, mainly because they are excited or frightened. Although the term is most often applied to animals, there have been cases of humans stampeding from danger too.
Cattle stampedes
The animal behavior of stampeding was observed by cattle ranchers and cowboys in the American Wild West. Large herds of cattle would be managed across wide-open plains, with no fences to contain them. In these unbounded spaces, cattle were able to run freely, and sometimes the whole herd would take off in the same direction unexpectedly. Cowboys developed techniques to deal with this situation and calm the cattle, to stop the stampede and regain control of their herd. The term "stampede" came from the Mexican Spanish term estampida ('an uproar').
Cattle herds tended to be nervous, and any unusual occurrence, particularly a sudden or unexpected noise, could scare the cattle and kick off a stampede. Things such as a gunshot, a lightning strike, a clap of thunder, someone jumping off a horse, a horse shaking itself, or even a tumbleweed being blown into the herd have been known to cause stampedes.
One method used for stopping a stampede is to turn the moving herd into itself so that it runs in wide circles, rather than running off a cliff or into a river.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Stampede” is act of mass impulse among herd of animals or a crowd of people. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Stampede, mass and impulse, not as a finished interpretation.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2165983. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Stampede” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.