02/11/2020
The One O One
Cow 101 will always be remembered by everyone in the family. That was her ear tag number and even when she lost the tag and it was replaced with 49 we all knew her as 101.
I purchased her grandmother at a sale in Richland Center. I was selling pigs and had to wait for them to be weighed so I could get paid. While waiting I watch the cattle sale. They were selling new born calves. They would sell a calf in less than a minute’s time. Fun to watch. This black calf was older and heavier and looked like it had an umbilical hernia, which would lower its value. Long story short, I went home with the calf. It didn’t have a hernia but it had another problem. It refused to drink milk. If any of you have ever converted a calf from a bottle to a bucket you know what it is like. Teats on a cow point down and that is the way a calf drinks out of a bottle. Milk is in the bottom of a bucket so the head has to point down, not up, to drink. There is then a real battle of wills. Man against calf. This was the only calf that every beat me. Not before I was drenched with milk on multiple occasions.
So I said, “fine, eat feed, drink water, or die”. It ate feed, drank water and grew into a big productive cow. But I don’t think she ever forgave me trying to drown her in a bucket of milk.
Grandma cow was a leader. If a gate was left open she was the first to leave, leading the herd to the corn field. If a tree fell on the fence she would lead the herd into the neighbor’s woods. Her one redeeming trait was she always weaned the largest calf. She wasn’t mean just half wild.
I saved a daughter from her and she was similar to her mom but somewhat mellower. She didn’t last long in the herd but she produced 101 before she was sold.
101 had all of her grandma traits plus one, she was mean. When I would walk in the corral her head would go up and she would watch me the whole time I was around. When the time came for her to give birth she would jump the corral fence and go as far away as possible to have the calf. Several times she wasn’t content to stay on my farm she would jump into the neighbor’s woods to calve. She was a professional at hiding her calf. She would be gone and we would look for her. There were times when we knew she had calved but couldn’t find her. Then after 4-6 days she would bring her calf up to the herd. By now it was as wild as she but like her grandma it was always the biggest calf. She was super protective and not to be trusted.
I remember once she calved in March after a big snow storm. She had plenty of bedded places to calf, out of the wind, but she jumped the pasture fence into the totally covered pasture and went as far as she could to calve. It was easy to follow her with 10 inches of snow on the ground. I took my ear tagger and syringes of vitamins and vaccines for the calf and follow the trail. There next to the line fence was this big black cold calf and an unhappy irritated cow. I remember tagging the calf and giving it the shots with the fence touching my back and the cow bumping my hat with her head. I don’t always do the smartest things. That calf followed her though the snow, a quarter mile back to the barn.
At least he and I were really tired when we got there.
101 weighed about 1500 lbs. and was all black. She was ¼ Holstein and ¾ Angus. There was not a fence she could not jump. I made my corrals with her in mind. I used railroad ties and highway guardrails and made them 6 feet high. One time I was pregnancy checking the cows and I decided to tranquilize her before I started. She was really woozy but still tried to go over a 6 foot gate. She got her whole body over except her back legs which went under the top rail of the gate. There she hung. And then the tranquilizer took over. Now she should have broken one or both back legs but this is 101. It was the only time I pregnancy checked (re**al exam) a cow suspended on a gate. She was pregnant again. I don’t remember how I got her off the gate but she only limped for a couple of days.
One spring day I lost my senses and moved her and her calf with 15 other cow/calf pairs to the farm on the Kickapoo River. I usually kept her on the home farm, which had better fences. Everything went well until the day I tried to move her home. We had weaned the calves a month before and now the cows had to be moved. We had them all in the corral and we had to haul two loads. 101 didn’t make the first load, (surprise). She was the last cow to go into the trailer on the second load, but before we could get the door closed she had a change of mind. She leaped past me and tired to go over a six foot wooden corral. She didn’t get over but she went through, totally demolishing that section of the corral. I said,”fine, stay here.” (I say “fine” a lot!) We took the rest home and left her. All the way home I kept thinking how stupid it was to leave a wild cow alone in a pasture on the river. So the next day I took the tamest cow I had, one that loved grain, back down.
My thinking was that I could call the “grain hog” and she would come and I could trap both of them in the repaired corral. I learned over the next two weeks that 101 had psychological power over the “grain hog”. When I called and they could see the bucket of corn and it was obvious the “grain hog” wanted to come in the worst way, 101 would look at me, tell the “grain hog” to follow and head off to the far end of the pasture. The “grain hog” would look longingly over her shoulder and submissively follow.
Then it snowed 12 inches. Now I had to haul hay down to them. I would put the hay in a parked cattle trailer and hide. After about 4 attempts I finally got them both in the trailer and the door shut. I was going to take her to my veterinary clinic and pregnancy check her but the thought of her leaping out and running around G**s Mills was too much.
A couple of weeks later I sold her and six other of my wildest cows through a sale barn. When I got my check I saw that they had pregnancy checked her and she was pregnant. Some poor farmer in Iowa now owns 101.
