Adventures Including Cows

 If you have never lived on a farm you likely do not understand the true excitement of living on one.  You, perhaps, may think that goats and cows and chickens are boring and only add chores to an otherwise blissfully free day—which is partially true.  Sadly, if this is your conception, you have been thoroughly misguided.

Owning cows has made for many, many different adventures throughout my childhood.

The first cows we ever got were Black Angus cattle, four steers, large, rather ugly, and not particularly bright beasts.  As children we immediately went about naming them—for all "pets" must have names.  The first cow we named was the largest of the lot, a large hulking black thing.  Naturally we named him Big Red.  Why we named a black cow Big Red I'm not sure.  When my mother asked me shortly after the cow was named why I picked that name I couldn't tell her—nor could I be talked out of the name—and my answer has not changed since.  The other cows must have had more reasonable names because I do not remember what we called them.



To keep our cows penned up—we were discouraged from simply letting them run wild across our property—we put up an electric fence.  The first day we got the cows we released them into the field where they promptly located the electric wires.  I suppose for a cow the most logical thing to do with a strange gray wire was to lick it—which they did.  The poor cow.  After all of the cows had gone through the same experience and decided that yes, indeed, the fence would shock them if they licked it, they left it alone.

All went well for a few weeks.  The cows stayed inside their pen and ate grass.

You would think, if a cow had been shocked once it would not attempt touching the fence again, but like I said, these were not particularly bright cows.  There are many unimagined problems with electric fences.  Firstly, if the grass around the fence grows more than a few feet it will touch the electric wire and, suddenly, there will be no electricity in the wires anymore.  Unfortunately for us, the cows were the ones who discovered this fact first.  We were told one day by a very excited six year old that the cows were out of the field.

"The cows have escaped!"

"Yes, of course dear, now run along and play."

"No, really.  They're out!"

"I'm sure they are."

"Come and see!"  Eventually we did and, indeed, the cows were out of their pasture.

The true excitement of the moment came when my mother, father, one brother, and I all went out to try and chase them back into their fence.  The problem with fences is that they are not designed to get free ranging cattle back through a small gate, but are only designed to keep them inside of it.  Cows do now like being guided through gates by people anywhere from eight to sixteen times smaller than they are.

The first time it was exciting to chase the cows all across our yard.  By the seventh or eighth time that summer we were beginning to get bored of chasing cows and disillusioned about cattle herding.

I think the most exciting chase was on a Sunday.  My mother had all of her sweet small children dressed up in their Sunday best and was trying to keep us clean for the ten or twenty minutes we had before we would leave for church.  What did my brother come in to tell us?  What else, but that the cows had escaped.

Usually, as rather considerate cows, they would stay inside our property.  They liked to wander clear out into the back yard and hide among a small forest of wild oaks, or meander into our orchard and eat the bark off of our trees.  Today they had found another path to take, the one that led out of our yard and onto the road.  That day we chased the cows repeatedly out of other people's fields and yards in dresses, dress pants, and mucking shoes.  Needless to say we did not attend church that day—although we did have a few neighbors mention our cattle related escapades the next time they saw us.

 I became very adapt at chasing after cows.

Now so that you are not disillusioned and think chasing cows is a game, and cows should be kept as pets, they ARE dangerous.  It is not that they don't make good pets, it is that they are not pets.  Once, trying to get our cattle from the field to a trailer for transportation we had about five adults, myself, and my younger brother who had been told to stay in the house and had come out anyways.  The cows, frightened by our slow advance towards them and not wanting to get into the trailer broke ranks and fled.  The easiest escape rout?  My brother, small, short, and young.  The cow put its head down, ran at him and flung him up into the air.

Luckily the cow did not have horns and it was a "gentle" toss—gentle being subjective seeing as it is being used to describe a cow that could easily have weighed over 1200 pounds.  My brother was alright, my mother was traumatized, and we were not invited out to help round up the cows again.