I awoke this morning to someone blowing their horn real loud. I looked out my bedroom window and there were cows walking right by, like it was no big deal. I immediately sprang up and screamed at my kids “the cows are out!”
If you live on a farm with livestock, sooner or later they’re going to get out. In fact, we quit breeding horses because there were too many around here to handle if they got out. But cows are different. One or two might get out and then you just round them up and get them back in.
But I was raised in the city, remember. The worst we ever had was when our toy poodle would get out and we had to chase him all over the neighborhood. I can still see my mother in her nightgown, driving slowly down the streets, looking to see if Coco was in someone’s back yard. Or she would send all three of her kids out, each taking a different street, hunting for the dog. Yeah, but that’s no comparison.
Moving to a dairy farm was a huge culture shock. For one, if cows got out, everyone had to work to get them back in. You couldn’t plead ignorance. You couldn’t say that you were bad at it. You couldn’t. Even if you didn’t have a clue what to do, you still had to act as a human shield by standing in their most likely escape route, especially when you were close to getting them in. I still stand in one spot, wave my arms up and down like I’m getting ready to take off flying, going shhh, shhh, praying like hell that the cow does not decide to come my way and if she does she will be deterred by my sounds and movement. But I will tell you this, there have been many a time that I would duck and cover to avoid getting run over by one of those hateful cows. Of course, then I got chewed out because I let the cow get by me.
I have a lot of stories of the cows getting out. My most favorite ones are of chasing the cow up the road because they decided to take a walk. You had to get in front of them in order to turn them around. But you had to run to get in front of them. That’s when they decided it was a game and they would start running too. I’ll never forget the first time that happened. From that point on, I never took the lead spot again. I wasn’t the only one who chased them like that. And I wasn’t the only one who got chewed out.
When we were milking cows we would move them across the road in the morning after milking and bring them back in the afternoon to milk them again. So we would block traffic while they came across. People that knew the area knew this. They knew the process and they knew the timing. But if someone was new to our area or just passing through they didn’t expect to see all of the cows in the road. We had the state put up “cow crossing” signs but they always got stolen. One day I was standing in the middle of the road, hearding the cows across the road and there was a car coming around the turn going much faster than the speed limit. We had a cow who was not going to get out of the middle of the road. I waved my arms to slow the car down but Jimmy told me to get out of the road. But what about the cow? I ran up the drive-way about the same time that the car decided to take the ditch. They missed hitting me by a few feet. When they got out of the ditch we were apologizing about the cow not getting out of the road, but we could tell they were drunk. That was confirmed when they begged us to just pull them out of the ditch and not call the police or for a wrecker. Once I got over being scared to death somebody was going to be killed, I got really mad. It was a good thing they were already gone by that time.
But my favorite story is not about the cows getting out. It’s about trying to get new heifers across the road so we could milk them. They had never been milked before. There were about six of them. Across the road is straight up a hill. Once you get up the hill it’s not so bad but trying to heard heifers who didn’t have a clue what you wanted them to do was almost impossible. At the time we didn’t have a 4-wheeler or anything like that. These heifers stayed in front of us the whole time so we were chasing them where they wanted to go. By the time we finally got them across the road I was exhausted. I went in the house, called the John Deere dealer and had them bring me out a Gator. It was the best decision I ever made. I told Jimmy it was his fault because he shouldn’t have had somebody who didn’t know what they were doing trying to get the heifers to do something that they didn’t know what they were doing.
I asked my daughters what were their favorite “cows getting out story” and this is what they came up with:
Carilynn remembers one year we were loading up to go to the State Fair. At that time we had a black lab named Casper, who was not raised on the farm, but loved being able to run free. We put Casper up because he would chase the cows and we needed this process to be as easy as possible. But Casper got out and chased the Aged Cow. Of course, she took off running. In Dairy Showing, the Aged Cow is an older cow and is usually shown twice in a show. Our Aged Cow was our money maker. She always came into the money at dairy shows. Jimmy was furious. His prized cow was being chased around like a heifer. He was so mad.
Carilynn also remembers when the horses got out. After we quit milking we started breeding draft horses. Jimmy always wanted working horses around the farm. We never did anything with them other than let them pull a wagon in a parade but Jimmy loved having them around. And he got to breeding them. At one time we had over 10 horses on our place. And the time they got out into our tobacco patch and started bucking through the patch was almost scary. We didn’t want them to get hurt but we definitely didn’t want them to hurt our crop.
Katie remembers another time, the cows got out into the tobacco patch when the tobacco was almost ready to cut. It was a couple of heifers in heat, and they found a bull in our neighbor’s field. But they had to walk through that tobacco to get to him. That one was our own fault. We had taken our horses out to Fancy Farm for a wedding and we had left the gate open since we were in a hurry. When we got back from Fancy Farm with the horses we knew that the heifers had gotten out. Jimmy and Katie hunted them down in our neighbor’s field and brought them back home. Oh, we ended up with two baby heifers because of that outing so it wasn’t such a bad thing for us.
In life, the cows get out all the time. The unexpected happens and you have to move quickly to rectify the situation. Some of those times it’s tragic, like a sudden illness or even death. But in our day-to-day world we all have times when we have to get up and get it taken care of right now this minute. It can be professionally or socially. It could be a sick kid where you decide in a split second that they need to go to the doctor or the hospital. It can be a “prized” client who is not happy with your latest transaction. How you handle the situation helps to build your character. Personally, I may not be very good at getting the cows back in, although I’m a whole lot better than I used to be, but I am wonderful at calming an irate customer. I know exactly how that is done. And it could be that I’ve been doing that all my life but it also could be that I have really good instincts in dealing with people in business, just like my husband, the farmer, has really good instincts about his cows. Yes, he has been taking care of them his entire life but his instincts are spot on.
So, what is your “cows getting out” story?
