The fire service are allowed to ram cars if they're impeding the progress of an appliance on it's way to a call.
Clearly animals are different, but I know if you try claiming against the service as a result of having the wing of your car destroyed, you're on a hiding to nothing.
There's a few streets down here that are that narrow, and people have lost cars due to bad parking, and I've had it confirmed by your gin-yoo-wine fire man as well.

^^ Reminds of the film Backdraft, where a car blocking a hydrant has a hose put through its windows.

It's a funny thing, but how many people would like to be told their home and family were destroyed by fire because a cow was in the way? Everyone's very critical of the service, until it's them in a car crash, or burning.

Yes but people should be insured.

How exactly does that help you when you're trapped in a burning building hoping some fireman shows up to save your life?

Yes but sacrificing the public on the street for those in property is mot a fair trade.

If you die, you can sue whoever held up the appliance.

On what grounds?

The farmer had just as much right to be on the road as the fire engine.

For all those who say the fire engine should have been prepared to meet animals, by the same token, should the farmer not have been prepared to move the [LIFTED] out of the way for the emergency services?

How? Have you ever moved cattle along a road?

It's not a school outing. You can't make them stand in an orderly line to one side of the road whilst the vehicle progresses. Each cow is a very strong, twitchy, highly-strung, dangerous, half-ton idiot pot-roast. Get them in groups and they'll do the most besh*ttedly feckwitted things without provocation; frighten or anger them and they're liable to kill some poor bugger.

And what if they don't kill, injure or damage someone or something else? They'll likely damage themselves. Make a lactating cow run and you'll likely injure its udders and give it mastitis. Make any cow run for too long (esp. uphill) and it'll end up with Hypomagnesaemia ("Staggers") and a >20% chance of death by respiratory failure. Going downhill? It's not unusual for a running cow to trip and dislocate a hip - off it goes to the slaughterhouse. Any way the farmer loses a fat wad of cash - either he loses up to £300 because the cow wasn't finished or he loses up to £900 because a finished animal is dead or untold amounts because a carefully tuned mother and all the potential calves have been lost. Dairy farmers also lose all the milk that a dead or injured cow would produce.

What did the fireman think would happen? Did he expect them to form up acrobatically like some bovine motorcycle display team? Did he think that, upon hearing loud noises and flashing lights, the cattle would presume it to be some kind of mobile disco, come over all bashful and stand to one side in wallflower-esque embarassment? Did he think they were rehearsing for a land-based livestock reenactment of the Battle of Jutland? Or perhaps he expected Elvis to sweep down on his chariot and whisk them away to the great burger factory in the sky? Maybe, just maybe, he thought that his siren could somehow change the immutable laws of Physics that dictate that a cow-human collision is rarely elastic.

Whatever the truth is, the fireman acted like a knobhead and some other poor sod paid for it bigtime.

So no, it just doesn't work like that. The road does not exist purely for the passage of vehicles. Sometimes the road is blocked - go to plan B or wait.

I dunno about you, but maybe I think he would have preferred that to being dead?

Indeed.

My point however was that even if the farmer had escaped unscathed, his livestock likely wouldn't have.

Brilliant, I nearly wet myself reading that!!

So, cows > human life?
Again, I repeat my point - "Well, we would've liked to have saved your wife from barbecuing slowly in her car, but some cows were in the way."
FWIW, sister spent 20 years married to a dairy farmer.

Yeah, but if I remember rightly, you're not particularly well disposed towards him at the moment! Or is that just your sister!?