Shipping Cows

Today Leon, his friend Arlin, and I shipped their cows. We had 22, but 2 died (this was a horrible winter for cows!!) It was a BEAUTIFUL sunny brisk morning, perfect weather!

 Leon dropped me off at the far east end of the field to start pushing the cattle towards the corrals, while they set up some panels.

  Everything was going great, the cattle were moving nicely, and I was mosy-ing along behind them taking pictures of the beautiful December day. I got the cows to the gate they needed to go through to where their water, and mineral tubs were, so this shouldn’t have been hard to get them to go through the gate, they do it all the time….. 

This is the cattle in the corner looking at me.. the second red calf from the right is the dumb one!!

 Well not today, maybe I just wasn’t intimidating enough. They all stopped and looked around, so I just stood there, waiting and thinking that at least ONE cow would go through the gate on it’s own free will, then the rest would follow. There is one stupid red steer that likes to just run around and mess everything up, today he did just that, he was looking right at me, and all of a sudden he decides to just kick, jump, and take off, past me, to the COMPLETE opposite end of the field, where I had started gathering them from…… I wasn’t really upset, I enjoy walking around a field with cattle in it, I’m not being sarcastic here, I really do enjoy it. 

 This is the cattle running....

So I walked back to gather them up again, I finally get a head of them, and start to turn them around, and Them I see Leon and Arlin coming up the field to help me, YAY! :) 

 We started pushing them back towards the gate again, they get to the gate, and that dumb red steer looks up, and looks at me or past me, and he started running down the fence line to try and get past me, well I was NOT going to let THAT happen! I ran across to fence and I start jumping and waving my hands, tying to be intimidating enough to turn him and all the other calves that were following him around, and it WORKED!!!! SUCCESS!!!!! We got them back into the corral, and they go quite nicely into where the panels were set up, and by this time, I was lagging behind, trying to catch my breath, it’s a hard thing to do in 35 degree weather, and the guys closed  them in the pen. 

 This little black heifer is Cookie! We got her from Leon's neighbor Bob Cook, hence the name Cookie :)

 We loaded them up and took them to the feed lot where we sold them.We had to weigh them in 2 separate groups because they all couldn’t fit on the scale. We had no problem with the first group, and he second group did fine, until we were running them back to their pen, and one of the gates wasn’t latched all the way and 4 of them pushed through and ran down the LONG ally, so Leon and I took off running as fast as we could after them, and finaly got them turned around at the end of the alley, once again after they got turned around I was lagging behind trying to catch my breath :)  

 This is the river that borders the field the calves were in.

 This is my studly husband being studly :)

 This is our cow dog lol....not really :)

Anyways, go them all taken care of and settled in, then we all went back to Leon’s shop to droped off our 3 heifers at the barn until we can take them to the auction, but maybe I can convince Leon to hold off a while, I like having them around :)