Working Ranch Magazine - Index

Working Ranch Magazine - magazine - Index

in the case of wild steers or bulls) has
gone feral, reverted to primal instincts,
and will not generally come in on a
gather. Successfully hunting down true
wild cattle is a cowboy’s dream challenge,
a career defining exercise not for
the faint of heart.
I’ve never personally had much to
do with actual “wild” cows of the second
variety, the kind that live the better
part of their lives down in the
Arizona canyons and Texas riverbreaks.
My cowboying was restricted to the
Pacific Northwest and freezing winters
up in that neck of the woods wouldn’t
really support a wild cattle population
for too long. They tend to either die of
exposure and starvation, or give up
and come in looking for feed during
the worst of the winter weather. But I
love hearing stories about cowpunchers
that tangled with the wild ones,
78 |WORKING RANCH | JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2008
either picking them off one by one on
the end of a rope or trapping them.
The wilder the story, the better.
COWBOY EXPERIMENT –
CONDITIONING THE COWHERD
Let’s pretend that our cowherd is just
a regular good old commercial bunch
of cows that you’d find running on
almost any outfit with a decent-sized
grazing lease, the kind of pasture that a
cow would spend several weeks in
without much human intervention.
Can we condition them to varying
degrees of behavior? You bet. We can
make ‘em nice to be around, or really
hard to handle. But before we explore
conditioning any further, let’s figure
out the difference between trained,
spoiled and wild cows.
Trained cows:
• have been conditioned over the
years to respect the cowboys, horses,
dogs, fences and any other influencing
factor that the cowboss
chooses to expose them to,
• are a pleasure to work with.
Spoiled cows can be handled with
some degree of difficulty, but they
don’t generally:
• respect fences,
• respect cowboys, horses and dogs,
• understand that it is in their best
interest to stay where the cowboys
put them and make the best of the
available feed.
Wild cows, on the other hand:
• are very difficult to handle,
• are dangerous, especially when you
have one singled out,
• ain’t worth the trouble it takes to
work with them.
SIX WAYS TO SPOIL GOOD COWS
1. Let your fences deteriorate until
they hang loose like Christmas lights
in a cheap trailer park. That’ll teach
the cows that a fenceline is more of a
suggestion than a physical barrier.
2. Dog your cows until they can’t
take it any more. That way, they learn
to hate dogs, and anytime they are
gathered and moved they spend most
of their conscious energy fretting
We all need to think about the chain of
production. Someday your calves might
end up in a feedyard just like this one, and
they’ll be handled by people of all varieties,
some on foot and some ahorseback.