For anyone who suffers from devastating dementia-related illnesses, the world can become a confusing and scary place.

Even streets that were once as familiar as the back of their hand can be transformed into menacing places of strangeness, and those with Alzheimer’s or similar diseases can have great trouble in making themselves understood if they get lost. So a new initiative by West Yorkshire Police to speed up the process when dementia sufferers are reported missing from registered care homes can only be a good thing.

By signing up to an existing initiative called the Herbert Protocol, care providers can trigger an early-warning system when someone wanders out of their home, ensuring police are fully aware that the lost person suffers from a dementia-related illness and the appropriate efforts can be made to swiftly locate them and return them to a place of safety. Time is of the essence when vulnerable people go missing as hazards and dangers present in everyday situations can be overlooked or ignored as the missing person wanders the streets.

This is something that there is absolutely no reason for any care provider to not wholeheartedly endorse. While the majority of care homes have stringent security measures in place to stop people wandering off, there will always be occasions when it is not possible to prevent such an occurrence, and this system will surely help in solving the crisis as quickly as possible.

Cow and calves

The very phrase “I was attacked by a cow” sounds, at first, slightly ridiculous. The docile, big eyed creatures we are used to seeing in our fields are hardly, after all, the usual stuff of childhood, let alone adult, nightmares.

We are much more used to associating male cattle, in the form of brutish looking bulls, with danger.

But the serious injuries suffered by Otley hairdresser Janet Jackson last weekend, caused by an animal amongst a herd with calves at Dob Park, was a vivid reminder that something of the wild always remains in all our livestock.

It seems the simple fact Janet and her husband, Andrew, had appeared beside the herd was enough for this particular cow’s maternal instincts to transform into direct aggression. Such incidents appear to be becoming more common around the country. Often there is a dog involved, which triggers the mother cows to attack to protect their young. That was not the case here, however, and neither were the Jacksons ‘townies’, unused to being around cattle. The simple fact is that they were walking on a public track when they came across this herd as they turned a corner, and were instantly set upon – with only Mr Jackson’s quick intervention preventing the cow from fatally crushing his wife. The National Farmers’ Union is right to say that the vast majority of farmers take their duty of care to people in the countryside seriously. But they should also give serious consideration to Mrs Jackson’s call for cows to be kept away from publicly accessible fields, wherever possible, when they are with calves.

Otherwise, we will keep running the risk of this happening – with potentially tragic consequences.