Not the truants, just some cows and heifers eating breakfast
Yesterday's post featured the girls leaning on sorting sticks and about a football field's worth of temporary electric fence. If you haven't read the comments suggesting possible scenarios...they are excellent and worth your time.
Speaking of temporary, that fence was VERY temporary. Within ten minutes after we finished using it there was nothing to show for its ephemeral existence but a bucket full of rolls of wire with a LOT of surveyor's tape on it and a couple of bundles of fence posts.
See lightning fried one of the fencers and let the big, horned heifers out into the night.
I am honestly afraid of those big horned heifers. They are big, and, well, they have horns.
Thus even looking for them wasn't high on my agenda. However, they very obligingly, after eating some hostas, wandering all over the lawns leaving fertilizer, and putting hoof prints all over everything, went up in the unused pony yard and lay down.
All we had to do to catch them was close the gate.
However, they couldn't stay there. No watering trough, no shelter, way too small etc.
How to get them down the great distance between where we wanted them and where they were. Four driveways, multiple stretches of lawn, only a few of us to chase them, no horses, no ropes, no working dogs any more.
And I am afraid of them. It was an uncomfortable conundrum.
I thought about it all through milking and breakfast after chores and finally came up with an idea. Maybe we could build an electric fence out of the lightest wire we could get, some step-in posts, which we already had and flag the heck out of it so it looked like a lot more than it was. We could make a sort of alley to guide them back to the heifer barn.
We proceeded to construct just that and lined up the cheap help for the melee.
There actually were a few moments of excitement...enough for this week's Farm Side at least, but they did mind the "fence" and we got them back where they belong without too awful much drama.
Can we say thankful....why yes we can.
Posts
7 comments:
I think it's time to put the pups to work. Working dogs are happy dogs.
Good! I'm glad it worked and no one was lifted up with one of those horns...big and horns make me afraid also!
Linda
http://coloradofarmlife.wordpress.com
http://deltacountyhistoricalsociety.wordpress.com
Jan, can't beat a working dog for sure. Beck is thinking of having a go at agility with Gil. He seems to have that kind of mindset. Ren is so small yet....
Linda, I can't tell you how nervous I was or how grateful I was when they looked at the wire with all those fluttering bits of plastic and treated it like a real fence. They are pretty scary.
You guys are amazing! Smart and resourceful and (in the case of big horned heifers) brave.
WW, wow, thanks.
Reading this in light of your most recent post . . .
well . . makes me more appreciative of what you have to do in order that problems are addressed without people getting injured.
Cathy, I was really worried about dealing with them. they KNOW they have horns.
Post a Comment