Originally posted on Eliza Lynn Taylor's You Never Know! December 30, 2012...
It's a great way to start the day. You go out to the barn and something
just seems--wrong. It took a minute to figure it out. Someone was
missing- Black Jack the steer. Suddenly there he was, on the wrong side
of the barn in the feed aisle. Oh man! He had somehow managed to unhook
the clip holding his neck chain. They seem to be rather talented in that
area of late.
First one must catch the naughty fellow, and believe me, he is not all
that small- about 300 pounds. He also has decided he just isn't ready to
go back to his stall quite yet, so he ran up and down the aisle with me
calling after him. The aisle isn't that big and it's not worth chasing a
cow around the feed aisle, you just have to wait for him to calm down a
second, although every time I walked up to him to put the rope on his
head, he took off again. Hmmm. He's being extra naughty today. Usually I
can get him the first time, but then, he has made quite a mess of
things and he may be under the impression I'm going to get onto him
somehow. It's a cow; it doesn't do any good, as I have told my husband
repeatedly. Finally, I got the rope the on his head and he decided at
that point to just drag me down the aisle, only I jerked the rope to one
side as one would a rein on a horse and he stopped in his tracks. "Now,
if you're quite ready to go back home," I told him, "I can clean up
this mess and feed everyone." I also told the other cows to give him a
hard time since it was his fault they wouldn't be fed for a while as I
had to clean up the feed aisle. Yes, I know it doesn't do any good to
say such things to them, but it made me feel better.
He still wasn't ready to go back home but I got him out of the feed
aisle and into the center walkway, so I tied the rope off in his stall
(which thankfully is literally across from the short walk aisle between
stalls on the side where he had taken refuge.) I got behind him and gave
him a little smack on the rear to get him motivated. He tried to turn
and run down the walk aisle but when he reached the end of the rope, he
flipped completely over. I just smiled and chuckled a bit. "So, are we
ready now?" He got up and went to his stall. I had to motivate him to go
on and cross the gutter and move forward enough to hook him back up,
but he went.
My goodness, what a mess he made! He managed to knock down five of six
bales of hay we had thrown out of the hay mow the night before and
pulled the hay string off of two of them, scattering one all over the
place. The hay that had not been eaten was no longer fit to eat as he
had hygiene issues (that's safe wording right?) in the hay so I had to
spend twenty minutes just cleaning the hay out of the aisle and making
sure I could actually give the cows their grain before haying them
again. At least the concrete was not in need of disinfecting since it
all managed to land in hay piles. (That was good trick too.)
Since we have a doorway (minus an actual door) leading to the silo room
(we aren't using them) we blocked it off with a piece of plywood and
some old straw bales to insulate the barn against the cold. It is at the
end of that walk aisle between stalls I mentioned earlier. The water
lines and bowls tend to freeze there if it isn't blocked off in the
wintertime. That rascal pushed on those bales until he broke the cords
holding the plywood up and knocked it over. The bales actually stayed in
place, thank goodness. After the mess was cleaned up and the rest of
the chores were done, I went outside and around to the other side of the
doorway and put the plywood back up, only this time I nailed it to the
framework and them braced it with some long two-by-four lumber. Let's
see him knock it over now!
Have you ever had days like that?
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