I have been following a thread on another e-mail list comparing the mothering rating of the cow that tries to attack anyone who gets close to their new-born calf as opposed to the cow that is OK with this. The consensus seems to be that the mellow cow is not as good mother as the cow that will try to eat you. I disagree with this.<\/p>\n
Bud and I found that when you work livestock properly \u2013 that is, by using pressure\/release methods instead of force and fear, the cows learn to respect but not fear you.\u00a0 Since they don\u2019t feel you are a threat to them, they also don\u2019t think you are a threat to their calf so they don\u2019t \u201cget on the fight\u201d when you need to handle their new baby.<\/p>\n
When we lived in Canada we were involved with a Beef Booster cow herd.\u00a0 In case you aren\u2019t familiar, this is a composite breed.\u00a0 Some of the herds were rated \u201cMaternal.\u201d Their main function was to produce heifers to go into the cow herd, another raised \u201cTerminal bulls\u201d to use on the herds that would market all of their calves, etc.\u00a0 The man we worked for had about 100 head of cows that were designed to raise \u201cTerminal bulls.\u201d\u00a0 He wanted to change over to a \u201cMaternal\u201d herd so he swapped his herd with a neighbor.\u00a0 When these cows were delivered the neighbor also delivered a list of ear-tag numbers of cows that would kill you if you tried to handle their baby calf.\u00a0\u00a0 The only way they could weigh and tag the calf was with a bucket loader on a tractor.\u00a0 A man in the bucket would get the calf, then the tractor operator would try to raise the bucket before the cow could climb in, too.\u00a0 We received these cows in October.\u00a0 We handled them quite a lot.\u00a0 If the feedlot shipped a pen of cattle and there was still feed in the bunks, we\u2019d put these cows in the pen for a while to let them clean the bunk.\u00a0 Through the winter we tried to move their straw bed every few days to make it easier when they farmed the ground in the spring.\u00a0 This usually meant we had to drive the cows to the new bed a couple of times to discourage them from going back to the old one, etc.\u00a0 When spring came the owner was able to weigh and tag every calf with no aggression from any of the cows.<\/p>\n
The first year we worked on the elk ranch In Texas, we didn\u2019t see an elk calf until it was a couple of weeks old.\u00a0 The following year, the cow elk would bring their newborn calves with them when we drove through the pasture, scattering hay.\u00a0 We even had one calf born in the corral.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I have been following a thread on another e-mail list comparing the mothering rating of the cow that tries to attack anyone who gets close to their new-born calf as opposed to the cow that is OK with this. The consensus seems to be that the mellow cow is not as good mother as the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stockmanship"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stockmanship.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stockmanship.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stockmanship.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stockmanship.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stockmanship.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2156"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stockmanship.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2156\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2157,"href":"https:\/\/stockmanship.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2156\/revisions\/2157"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stockmanship.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stockmanship.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stockmanship.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}