Adventures With Cattle

Life can be quite dull without cattle.

David Will, who writes an occasional column in the Record about ranching, has inspired me to take up intensive rotational grazing. So a few months ago, I sectioned off part of the farm into a couple of small pastures. I’m using polywire electric fence, and the cows really respect it.

Last Saturday, I checked on my cattle at my parents’ place north of Ammannsville. It was about time to move them into a new pasture.

They’re always excited when they hear my old diesel truck come down the driveway. Whenever they hear it, they know they’re going to get treated to some range cubes.

About a month ago, I moved them into a new pasture. They went right in. No trouble at all. But now it was time to go back into the pasture where they started. The grass was green and lush compared to the brown stubble where they had been. I figured they would go right in.

So I opened the gap. They just stood there looking at me. At that point, I should have just left the gap open. I could come back later. Eventually, they’ll figure out the wire is gone and cross over.

“Na,” I thought, “Surely they’ll come to some cubes.”

So I opened a sack of cubes and poured a few in a bucket. I glanced at the cows and they were licking their lips and salivating.

“They’ll come now,” I thought.

I walked over to the gap and shook a few cubes on the ground. One of the more curious momma cows stuck her head across the line where the fence was, shook her head and snorted.

The grass was pretty tall on my side of the gap.

“Maybe they can’t see the cubes,” I thought.

So I dumped a few on their side where the grass was shorter. They ate those, but they would not walk over to the tall grass.

“Maybe I need to make a trail of cubes,” I thought.

Well, they ate those cubes right up to the line where the gap was, but still, they wouldn’t cross. They just stared at me.

I was by myself, with no one to help me “push” them.

By this point, I had used up almost the whole sack of cubes. And half of them were in the tall grass, uneaten.

So I bent down, gathered all the cubes I could find in the grass, and put them in the bucket for another try.

This time, my old donkey who runs with the cattle figured out that the electric fence was down. She crossed over, followed by the bull-cow.

Those of you poor souls who don’t have the pleasure of owning cattle might not know what a bull-cow is, so let me explain. Every herd of cattle I’ve ever been around has a bull-cow. This is the cow who leads the rest of the herd toward cubes, hay, shade, water, through the fence, onto the road, into the neighbor’s pasture, the hay meadow you don’t want them in, your garden, or whatever she decides to get into. If the bull-cow goes there, the rest of the herd usually follows.

One by one, the rest of the cows passed through the gap. Except for one straggler. I call her Red. All of my cows and my bull are predominantly black Angus. But this one must have some of those old genes that express a reddish color to her hair.

So Red just stood there watching the other cows munch.

So I decided to try and “push” her into the pasture. I knew this wouldn’t work. It was hot – middle of the day. But I had to try it anyway. I grabbed the best-looking stick I could find on the ground.

I spoke to her with my auction barn cowboy impersonation: “Move cow, move cow. Hot-chaw, hot-chaw! Come’on cow. Hot-chaw! Move cow. Git-on-in-there!”

There I was, flapping my arms like a bird, poking her with a stick, while speaking gibberish. She started towards the gap and then turned around to me. I tried to put a few moves on her like a defensive back in football. But I was a lineman back in my playing days. This nimble 900 lb. beast juked, and I fell down.

Red took off for a clump of trees. I looked back to the gap. I guess the rest of the cows got curious. They ran back into the pasture I was trying to move them from. Now I was at square one. By now, I had spent about two hours in the sun trying to get the cows to walk into a pasture. Finally, I mustered up enough good sense to just leave and come back later. Sure enough, the next morning, they were in the new pasture. I closed the gap behind them and went home.

Oh, the fun you can have messing with cows.