Mad Cows and Englishmen
Most people have probably heard warnings about getting between a mother bear and her cub. You can probably extrapolate this concept of protective motherhood to encompass an awful lot of mothers in the animal kingdom. There are some mothers from our own species who fly in the face of this hypothesis, but those are stories for another day. I want to talk about cows and calves.
BUT FIRST! A little bull . . .
(Photo stolen from these guys)
1987 marked the end of the Holstein-Friesian cow's supreme reign on our property. It's a long and tiresome story that I won't bother you with tonight, but the very strict terms of the buyout agreement my parents signed in 1986 made it absolutely verboten to have any cow on the property who was even THINKING about looking black and white. So, after a short interlude of a very strict cow-free ranch, Dad started raising Limousins.
I didn't spell that wrong, and these are not automobiles. Limousin is a French breed of beef cattle. They are usually the color of an Irish setter or golden retriever (although they can also be black), and they are known for their mild manner, as beef cows go. Here are some lovely Limousins, with horns, in their country of origin:
(Photo stolen from these guys)
When the dairy was operational, the only bovine on the ranch that wasn't black and white was the catch bull. Always a Hereford bull, the catch bull's job was enviable by almost any standard: he lived with an ever-changing group of females, most of whom were very young (think teenage cows). Any cows in with the catch bull who weren't teenage cows, were probably on their way out and desperate to get pregnant. All this bull had to do was, well, what came naturally. Small talk was optional, no one had to buy anyone any dinner, and the moral code of the pasture was clearly on the side of his good time.
This is Bully-Bully, as named by Sparky.
The catch bull's job was to "catch" unbred heifers: to impregnate them when artificial insemination (A.I.) had failed, which would jump-start their fertility cycle and get their milk flowing. The catch bull was never a Holstein, for two reasons. One, any calf sired by the catch bull would be a half-breed, and would be instantly recognizable as such by its white face, usually. The calf, which was just not as important as the kicking off of its mother's milk production, would be sold immediately after it was born. Second reason the bull was never a Holstein: because Holstein bulls are known for their mean tempers, third behind Cape Buffalo and Naomi Campbell, if reports are to be believed.
You ever see a Holstein bull in a bull riding show? Me neither. Know why? 'Cause they're TOO MEAN!
So my siblings and I grew up around docile female Holstein cows and the occasional exhausted Hereford bull. We were cautious around a cow with a calf, but I don't remember any Holstein cows giving anyone a scare.
Fast-forward to the beef cow years (including the present). There are behavior differences between the sweet docile milk cows of my childhood and these Limousins. The Holsteins were all hand-raised, and had become used to being herded every day, three times a day. The Limousins are not. The Holsteins never kept their calves for more than 24 hours, and so no strong maternal bonds really formed. The Limousins have their calves with them until well past the calves' voting age, and very strong maternal bonds are forged. You can imagine, then, that getting between a Limousin cow and her calf becomes a tricky thing.
I first learned just how tricky negotiating the beef cow-calf bond can be when I was home from college, helping Dad try to isolate one cow from the herd one day. She and her calf were ushered into a small corral inside a large barn -- what had been the maternity barn when the dairy was operational. The barn had become, by this time, mostly a hay barn, as well as a place to store tractors, trucks, even a boat. For some reason the old dairy pickup had been stranded within this small corral, never to run again. Both of its doors has been scavenged, rendering it an open air vehicle. The corral was large enough to hold three pickups abreast, if need be, but this day it had only the one pickup, one suspicious beef cow, and her clueless calf. It was our job to separate the cow from her calf and the pickup, and isolate her in a chute where the vet could examine her.
Photo stolen from www.twemlowslimousins.co.uk/2005_ultra&aqua.JPG
I'm sure you won't be surprised to hear that Ms. Cow had other plans.
We were completely unprepared for the cow's self-confidence, and her absolute surety that she was NOT going into that chute. This was new -- aren't cows docile creatures? Didn't she get that memo? Um, no. And she backed up her position with physical threats. She chased one guy (I think it was the vet) around that pickup so fast that he was glad there were no doors on it as he dove through the cab to get away from her. Well, Mama Cow hadn't heard that cows don't drive, and she followed the vet right into the cab. Chevrolet pickup cabs are known to be spacious, but not quite spacious enough for a rampaging cow. The vet was lucky, and the upside of this whole unplanned set-to was that Dad was able to roll the calf under the fence while Mama was busy bullfighting. Cow: zero, Man: one, but just barely.
There was one other time when I experienced how stupid it is to get between a beef cow and her calf. I was walking through the east pasture, going to the middle of the pasture to reset the irrigation. Behind me was the hay barn and manger where Dad's one lone Brahma cow stood munching, her back to me. She was not ornery at all, but I was wary of her because she looked so fierce. This is a Brahma cow from India:
Photo stolen from www.scz.org/images/animals/130_image_zebu1.jpg
While our cow was not a purebred, still she had the hump atop her shoulder, the sagging jowls around her throat, and the long down-turned ears. And didn't she have horns? I can't quite remember, but I steered clear of her.
I had to cross the ditch and was about five feet short of it, when up jumped a new baby calf out of the ditch with a yelp. It was a Brahma crossbreed -- her calf, which she'd hidden in the ditch while she went to eat -- and I was between the calf and its mother. Brahma Mama bellowed suddenly from the barn behind me. I turned around to see her charging across the pasture in my direction, bellowing like a maniac, jowls flapping in the wind, so I bolted for the irrigation block mid-field. When I got to it I looked back, but thankfully the cow had stopped chasing me; she hovered close to her calf and caught her breath. I waited a while before climbing down from the 5-foot high concrete irrigation block, and sneaked home quietly.
No wonder cows are sacred in India! I wouldn't mess with Brahmas either. Or any, mother, really, if I happened to be between her and her offspring.