Reasonably Educated Bumpkins

This is part of the south wall of the calf barn.

Not the old calf barn; that would be this, these days. . .

. . . but the "new" calf barn, which is maybe only 30 years old. And stands unused anymore. Anyway, do you know the cause of those holes are in the siding? Let's take a closer look.

Plywood siding; nothing unusual, other than those strange organic-shaped holes. The holes were created by baby calves, who (after having drunk every last drop of warm milk from their plastic buckets, and sucked on the buckets as long as they could get away with it) sucked on anything else they could. If you walked down the row of pens just after feeding time, you'd see 50 calves, from a few days to a couple of months old, crane their necks as far through their gates as possible, trying to get some fingers or pant leg into their mouths. They'd settle for plywood, and over time, these strange holes were the result.

The funniest part was seeing, from some distance away outside the barn, several pink tongues extended through the holes, or an occasional lower jaw jutting through a hole as a calf got purchase and began sucking the tar out of that barn.

These days, because there are no more dairy calves, but only beef cows around the ranch, the little ones stay with their mothers, and get their milk from the source. It's a very different scenario to see calves consorting with each other, romping together or just relaxing in one another's company. I really enjoy their freedom.

Even their piddling in public.

Posted by Laurie LaGrone at 10:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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! Come to think of it, we've never seen Naomi Campbell in a bull riding show, either . . .

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 these guys)

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 these guys)

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.

Posted by Laurie LaGrone at 03:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

In a perfect world, animals -- both domestic and wild -- would stay where we want them. In the real world, it rarely works that way.

I was reminded of this fact this morning as I scanned the paper, and read of a bear in Tahoe who had crossed the line into Human World way too far, and one too many times. Because the bear threatened a sheriff's deputy the bear had to be put down. (It could well be the same bear who keeps coming to my friend Margaret's Tahoe cabin door and breathing on the glass, and if so she won't have to worry about nose prints anymore.)

Good fences make good neighbors, they say, and it's probably true, especially when cows are behind those fences. When first we moved to the dairy that became our family home and compound (the Pushing Water Ranch, as I have named it), the 70 acres of barns and pasture were compartmentalized by barbed wire fences. Over time, wooden posts rot, wire sags, cows scratch, and soon there's a tempting stretch of fence just begging a curious cow to step across. In the middle of the night. For no apparent reason. "Cows out!" became an all-too frequent rallying cry, and there was no arguing -- time to pull on shoes (boots in the winter), bathrobes, whatever you got. Cows on the road won't wait until morning, and cows on the neighbor's lawn would be frowned upon, but BULL in with the neighbor's heifers is a real no-no. Trudge, trudge trudge, out to chase cows.

One rainy winter pre-dawn morning I was awakened by a loud "GLOWRPH!" which is a sound not easily reproduced in print. Instantly the outside patio light went on, and I staggered from my bed to the window to see my mother outside in her nightgown, in the rain, carrying a long pole. It took a minute for my junior high brain to understand that a cow had fallen into the pool, and Mom was herding it toward the steps with the pool brush. (The "GLOWRPH!" came from the cow, not from my mother, by the way.)

Time to go chase cows.

Dad was dressing and in his boots, and there was no way around this, so out into the rain we went to find and herd the cows. This was big news later that day at my school, let me tell you.

We've had many of these stories over the years: the opossum who fell into a trash can, the cow who fell into a septic tank, Dad's rabbits who staged a jailbreak so often that he finally just let them run free, the bantam rooster who kept falling in the pool and riding around on the floating pool sweep (he miscalculated once and that ended that) . . . animals just won't stay where you put them.

After a few successful years of dairying Dad had sturdy iron fences built to replace all but a very few of the ratty old barbed wire (that's pronounced "bob wahr") fences. Good management, good neighbor relations. Now, on the rare occasion that cows get out, it's usually because someone left the gate open, but you can't solve for stupidity.

Posted by Laurie LaGrone at 01:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)