Tame Livestock

Farmer Frank has a post up today that reminded me of a couple of stories. He discusses the hardships that 4H animals and the kids and parents involved deal with in the kind of heat we're having. Plus, he mentions the idea that the average city dweller finds the practice cruel once they discover that the animals in question are slaughtered for their meat, and fail to understand why. I guess the farmers should keep the animals until they die of old age, but that hardly "pencils out." The livestock are not pets, even though they get treated as such often enough.

My Dad used to tell the story of how their family took in a goat and let it run free in the yard. It became quite the companion, especially when my uncle and he found they could take advantage of the goat's natural instinct to butt things to the extreme. They got out a small blanket and got to playing Toreador and Bull with the goat as the stand in for Toro. Ole!

This worked until one windy day when their mother, my grandmother, stepped out to bring in the laundry off the line and Faux Toro saw her skirts blowing in the wind. Remember, back in those days, farm women generally wore dresses. After Grandma was sent flying from a firm application of a head butt to the butt, as it were, Faux Toro was banished to the lot. Reportedly, she was not amused.

On a more personal note, Dad bought some little bulls when I was a teenager. We cut 'em and doctored 'em up, and turned 'em loose in the pasture. It was winter. I was outside messing around and saw all the calves bunched up at the feedot fence, so being primarily bored, I eased over to see if I could pet one. Usually, that was wasted time, but I was bored and had time.

Welp, I had one that was interested. I even fed him a snowball or three - he'd eat from my hand. We figured he'd been a bucket calf - his mama had died for some reason and he'd been tamed. So, as he grew up, I'd keep an eye out for him to scratch him down, and I generally had my good leather fencing gloves on.

Cattle don't take baths every day, and they're in a pretty dirty environment all the time. They get bits of feed bales wound up in their fur that have to itch like hell, plus flies bother them and so on. I'd scrub him all over with my gloves digging into his hide, and he loved it. But, he liked having his knob scratched even more.

Most of the cattle we ran are polled - hornless. If they show nubs as calves, we'd pull them out when we first processed the bunch as they came in - branding, doctoring, cutting their nuts and so on. But, on all the varieties of cattle we ever had - they've got a knob between their ears on top of their head that the horns would have grown from.

See how their head are kinda triangular at the top between the ears? That is where the "knob" is. Often, at the rear, the knob doesn't make a smooth transition to the neck - it rolls back under. You can generally grab 'em there from the front because your fingers will roll under that bone and you can get a grip.

Well, needless to say, that area fills up with crud. That calf just absolutely loved having his knob scratched, and frankly, I don't blame him - that must have itched like fire itself. He got pretty persistent about it, which wasn't really a problem when he was little.

As he got older and larger, it did become a problem. He was always right there when I was trying to feed bales into the bunks out of the back of a pickup - Dad driving and me bucking them off. I didn't have time to fool with him, and I couldn't really turn my back on the ornery steer. I got pissed and whacked him with a bale right in the noggin, but since the bale only weighed about a hundred pounds and he was getting up around five - he thought I was playing. 

Then there was the day he surprised me. I have no recollection of what I was doing in the lot, but I was out in the middle up to something. I turned around and there he was, snorting with impatience that I wasn't scratching him immediately if not before. He lowered his head and drove right into my body, bringing his head up when he hit me raking me from my stomach to my chest. I was launched several feet behind me, landing on my butt and back. Kinda knocked the wind out of me, too. But he wasn't done just yet, because he started bearing down on me with his head. He was gonna get the itch scratched if he had to grind me into the dirt. 

Welp, needless to say, that didn't set well with me, and I was up and over the fence before he could get to me.

I was a pretty healthy lad in those days - probably six feet tall (I hadn't yet grown to my full height just yet) and a couple hundred pounds. My steer pal was probably around six hundred pounds at the time. He wasn't trying to hurt me. He just wanted his knob scratched and was letting me know, taking an extra step to let me know this time - like I couldn't figure it out. No matter. He and his cohorts were very close to taking their next step to the slaughter house - they'd be purchased by someone who'd put 'em in a feedlot and finish 'em out. We didn't have to deal with our "pet" for much longer.

I've written before about the dangers of handling livestock. In that post, I quoted threecollie of Northview Diary from a post about some news stories of people being killed by livestock.

  I love cows. But they are not the creatures of Disney.

That statement is so true and needs to be used again. Livestock are dangerous enough, and the tame ones can be even worse in their own, innocent, ignorant way. When they aren't really scared of you much is when one should be on guard even over and above what is normal.

I was never a 4H kid, but I helped with my share of bucket calves. I'm certainly not condemning the practice of taming livestock by any means - it's essentially unavoidable. Most people not raised on a farm just don't think things through - what would happen if we kept livestock as pets? Most of the time - not a problem if one can afford to do that. You'd just better keep a weather eye out for the unexpected. Just because you've treated that calf real nice all that time is no guarantee it will return the favor, mostly because it's livestock and hasn't managed to learn human morals in it's existence. Expecting favors in return from essentially wild animals can get you hurt.