Question:
When you’re moving a herd of cattle either by yourself or with someone and you’re in the front and you need to turn them into a gate or whatever it is, what do you do when you ride up there to turn them and they turn and stare and won’t move until you get really close and then they scatter and bolt?
Quincy via email
Answer:
What you were describing sounds to me like untrained cattle. I vision them staring at you out of curiosity trying to figure out what you’re about.
Cattle that have been handled might look at you with both eyes but at some point respond with a fight zone in a soft manner.
Weaned calves or yearlings that have had enough experience with a herd of mature mother cows would have more experience to draw from. Young cattle that have been moved following the feed truck or herded with ATVs are likely to stare at you trying to figure out if you’re a four-legged prey animal like them or what’s going on. Then all the sudden you make some noise or a quick movement like a predator it can startle them and cause some form of a stampede.
At a cutting competition when someone goes in to settle the herd, what they are you doing is seeing how the cattle respond. I would rotate cattle clockwise, and rotate them counterclockwise. And what I’m looking for is to make sure they are as comfortable seeing me in the right eye as they are the left eye. Just like horses get left-sided cattle can be stronger on one side than the other. Most cutters rotate the cattle counterclockwise so they are seeing the rider out of the left eye. This could be a problem if the cattle aren’t as soft in the right eye as they are the left eye.
Some cattle might keep their head down hiding, or trying to avoid having a conversation with the rider. This would be another thing that I would be aware of because that’s the one that might charge by the rider in competition.
It only takes a handful of good experiences to get cattle on the right track. But it only takes a handful of bad experiences to make cattle wild or sour.
To me it’s no different than trying to move your horse right or left, move the front end or the back end, or go forward and stop. It may not always work as good as you like with cattle but those are the types of conversations that I would like to have so I at least know what I’m dealing with. Whether we are working with a single cow or a herd of cattle they both have a flight zone and balance point.
When I approach cattle I don’t expect them to be at any certain level of response. I approach them for their input to tell me where their knowledge and experience level is. I just like working a colt in the round corral for the first time that I don’t know anything about, I’m looking for their input on where we need to start.
Martin Black
