Yesterday I had adventures with cattle…
When I got home from work, I saw immediately that the three adult cattle had gotten into the hayfield somehow. I changed clothes and headed out and saw they’d broken the wire that held the gate closed and were happily munching the much nicer grass there. The two heifers couldn’t join them, because they are in a different paddock right now, to protect them from getting bred too young.
Anyway, I called the cows and the two females came running and I put some hay out for them. They thought that was a lousy idea and went back to the yummy grass. So I got some oats for them and they came again, but Charley, the bull, wouldn’t come.
So I took my cow coercion instrument and walked out into the hayfield with him and tried to shoo him back into the paddock with the cows. I tapped him with the whip on the flanks and poked him in the face when he didn’t move. He lowered his head and pawed the ground once at me.
Now Charley is pretty mild mannered for a bull, but he IS a bull and weighs over 1000 pounds. I decided not to force the issue at the moment and wait until he’d had his fill of grass. So I walked the fence line and made sure there were no trees down on it and it was as secure as the last time we let them out (i.e.: not very) As long as there aren’t cattle on the other side it’s an OK fence, but a determined bull could break through at several places just by leaning on rotten posts.
However, there ARE cattle on two other sides right now. Lots of lovely cows with no rival bulls to be seen. I got back to the barn and started working on putting up a mineral block holder and kept an eye on our cattle. Eventually Charley evidently had his fill of grass and meandered over to the west side of the field and called the neighbors cows to him. I could see them clustered around him across the fence, and then saw some of them attempting to mount each other. Oh, crap! They must be in heat!
I couldn’t take the pickup out into the field. The recent rain would have that truck stuck in no time. I pondered getting the riding lawn mower out, but wasn’t even sure it would start. It wouldn’t provide enough protection from an angry bull in any case. Then my eye fell on the large John Deere tractor. THAT would do it! I went in the house and got the tractor key and then loaded up a cattle panel onto the bucket of the tractor and headed through the cow paddock (dropping the panel off by the busted gate) and out into the hayfield. I tried to stay on the high spots to keep from tearing up the grass, but I occasionally had to cut through mucky areas.
I finally got to the far end where Charley was drooling over the lovely females. And I mean literally drooling. I drove right up to him and almost touched him with the bucket of the front loader before he deigned to move. OK- this wasn’t going to do. I stood up on the tractor, leaned out over the hood and swung the whip down as hard as I could and tagged him on the butt. He jumped and moved away. I followed with the tractor. Now let me explain about this whip I have. It isn’t a long bullwhip like Indiana Jones carried. Not only do we not have one of those, but I wouldn’t be able to snap it anyway. It takes a bit of skill, I believe. No, the whip we have is left over from our horse keeping days. It has a long stiff portion about five feet long and a swingy rope section another 5 feet long. Its meant for getting a horse to run around you on a lunge line and to keep them going when they slow down. In other words, it’s kinda short for what I was doing.
But it worked, after a fashion. I could only tag the bull with it when I was almost touching him with the tractor bucket. We went back and forth across the west end of the field for a bit, with him getting angrier and angrier, but there wasn’t much he could do about it with me up on the high seat of the tractor. Finally I remembered the whooping and yelling I’d heard the neighbors doing when they moved their cattle, so I tried screaming at him.
That got him to move off the west end. But he moved to the NORTH fence line, which is full of trees and stuff, and the fence wire is in much worse condition than the west fence. He started bellowing and calling the cows in the north field to him. ACK! So then I really started shrieking at him, but he ignored me, because the tractor wasn’t coming closer. Fine. OK. This was NOT going to happen! I was not going to lose my bull through the fence to some other herd of cattle and have to go get help from the neighbors in separating him out again. My husband is gone, you see, on a conference for his job. That’s why I’m doing all this stuff alone….
So, I raised the bucket of the front loader and tipped it until it resembled the front blade of a bulldozer and started shoving my way through the low branches and small saplings, screaming like a mad woman with the tractor revved as loud as it would go. With tree branches snapping and the tractor louder than ever, Charley’s nerve broke and he headed away from the north fence.
He tried to cut around me to get back to the west fence, but I was no longer being careful about tearing up the grass of the hay field, and I sped to cut him off. He headed east and north and got back in the north fence line, but I crashed through some more trees and he gave up. He rejoined his two cows and together they hightailed it back into their paddock. (And I never before knew that is a literal term! All their tails were held very, very high as they ran- in one case up over her back!)
They stayed away from the gate while I tied it back into place with baling twine and then put another cattle panel in front of that one and tied it to different posts. Charley eyed the tractor with distrust as he came up, but didn’t seem to bear me any ill will after our adventures. Just to be sure, I stayed on the other side of the tractor from him, but when I drove it back to the other gate, he just moved to the gate/cattle panel combo and stood there staring into the west. Stupid lovesick bovine! I admit, those were some awfully pretty heifers, but I doubt their owners would thank me for getting them bred to a different bull than they meant to.
So much of our language is farm related. I enjoy finding out new depths of meaning in old turns of phrase. Now I know the full meaning of being “bullheaded.â€