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We enjoy being
with our longhorns every day. We go out in the pasture with them and just
sit. They are beautiful animals. We learned over time that they have
personalities just like people. There are some that want to come up and
"talk", and there are some that want to be left alone. We've
had some that were the "leave me alone" type in the beginning
that have become "talkers". I'll try to put interesting stories
about our time with them on this page.
We
have a rottweiler named Nikki. We went out one morning because we had two
cows ready to have calves any day. We took the camera to take pictures of
the calves. We had one calf, so we’re ready to get a picture. We had just had cattle guards put
in. We’re walking
around trying to get a picture of this calf when all of the sudden there
was this terrible sounding “Mooooo!!” Our first thought was that one of
the cows had stepped into the cattle guard and gotten their foot stuck. Then when we were headed to get on
the 4 wheeler to find out what is going on, it dawned on us that with the
cattle guards we no longer had a gate to close where the dogs were. We jumped on the 4 wheeler and
took off toward our Nikki.
She was surrounded by cattle and didn’t know what to
do. The longhorns had circled
around her to keep her in check.
We drove up to her in the middle of the circle, had her come to
us, and helped her get up on the 4 wheeler. She was peeing all over the
place. The cows were still
running at her. Eddie threw
his hands up and yelled “STOP!” The cows looked up at him and
stopped right where they were.
We drove between them and back up to the house. Nikki didn’t get up for 4
hours! She was 13 years old
at that time, and we were sure she was going to die. She didn’t though. We had her with us for another 3
years before she went to Heaven.
She never did walk across that cattle guard again.
Nikki & Precious
We worked in Austin,
TX on weekends. We usually got home after dark on
Sunday. This one Sunday we
got out of Austin
early, so we got home when it was still daylight. We decided to drive down to the
next gate and check on the herd.
When we pulled up, there was a truck inside our property about 15
feet and the gate was standing wide open. We pulled up to block the people
from getting out of the gate to find out who they were and how they had a
key to our gate. It turned
out that the guy worked for the man who owned the oil pumper on the
property. He was the
maintenance guy. On this
particular night, though, he was meeting up with his girlfriend. She was driving the truck. We got out because our bull, Rocky
was acting funny. He had
drawn a line in the sand and was not allowing any of the
“girls” to cross over that line. He quickly herded me into the group
of girls, and proceeded to not allow me to cross that line either. Eddie told the guy that he didn’t
appreciate him leaving the gate opened, and that he needed to leave right
now. The guy said he had
parked his Harley Davidson motorcycle over by the oil tanks, and that he
needed to get it and would not be doing this again. Eddie told him to get on his
motorcycle and not to slow down when he drove by the cows. The guy left, we closed the gate,
and Rocky went back to letting everyone cross his line. That’s how we learned what a
“herd” bull is.
That’s a bull that will keep his girls away from any other
bull, whether it’s across the fence, or across the road.
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