strange behavior

[Farmer Kitty]

With the dairy cattle we have barns and stantions or tie stalls here. They are more used to people working around and with them then the usual beef operation. We don't usually need to do much with their hooves. We have stressed correct leg settings to correct he horrid ones that were here when DH took over the farm. This helps them wear the hooves down on their own instead of having to trim them all the time.

I know of beef operations that have squeeze chutes and holding pens to work with their beef cattle.

 

[jhm47]

You really should have cut those horns off when you had her down.

 

[amysflock]

I'm guessing most of you have a holding facility or a shoot system? DO some of you (or most of you) work your cows feet daily? I have a daily routine I do with our equine, but our cattle have never really had a problem.

You might consider setting up a V-chute using either a sturdy farm gate and a wall or other panel. That's what we did for our vet visit last Wednesday...I can post pictures if you'd like to see. We borrowed two panels from my FIL (we didn't have any, and our two working gates aren't attached to sturdy fencing), DH chained and roped one into a fixed position in between two beams in the barn, and rigged the other to swing back and forth. A rope from the fixed panel, behind the butt of the animal and tied tight to the swinging panel keeps them closed and the animal from backing up.

Our Bridgit is a wild child (3-year old) and even with her thrashing around the chute worked great. thewife can attest (right, thewife?)! The other nice thing is it accomodated everyone just fine, from our 7-mo old heifer calf to our 5-year old cow (who has a 3' beam from her horns).

You might see if you can tempt her with a bucket of some grain and get her used to you that way, and work up to getting her into a chute. The NICE thing about horns is you can rope em' and lead or tie them that way, but otherwise, yes, watch out.

 

[farmy]

yeah if you could post pictures that would be awesome. She is really the only one we can not walk right up to... when this happened to her I was just shaking my head and thinking, It would have to be this one...

I usually dont worry to much about their horns, I know they are capable of using them, but our guys just live a different kind of life. We dont have as many and can afford to spend one on one time with them. With Nacho as the exception most of our cows you could walk right out into the pasture and lay down next to them.

That being said Im always on guard with all of our large animals, they dont need horns to kill you!!!!

As far as tempting her with food... we've had her about 6 years, she's lived a relaxed lifestyle where she should be very happy, she's with friendly cows and a few steers and sees how nice we are to them... she is just not having it.

We dont know where she came from and I guess she learned to hate people there...

But I do have some experience with training large animals, so nothings impossible. I would like to see what you did for sure!

 

[laughingllama75]

We just raise several beef cattle (up until 2 weeks ago, we had 7. we only have one steer now).
We do not handle feet at all really, except on the babies. I did invest in a squeeze chute...worth it's weight in gold. You can put em' in it and do whatever without getting killed (well, up to a point!). I got mine used, I advertised for in the want ads for it.
Before we had the chute, we used a gate...got them in the corner, closed the gate on em (like a triangle) and we tied it shut with a quick release knot. not foolproof, but works well for shots, etc.

 

[amysflock]

What LL describes is the same thing as we did, only we had to use two panels because our gates weren't against anything sturdy enough (plus there's a hotwire along the whole fence, so that just wouldn't be kind!).

Here are photos of our temporary chute open and closed. The stationary panel is chained and tied to posts in the barn. The swinging panel (on the right) is roped to the stationary one, and kept about 18" apart in the front by a round of wood my DH notched with his chainsaw to fit. We used our boat ropes because they were handy, but any rope would probably work. The one closes to the left was the one we used behind their butts (lowered for the heifer calf, of course), wrapped around the swinging panel and held tight to squeeze the animals in the V. Our crazy woman still jumped a bit but couldn't go very high, and couldn't move side to side or backwards. We pulled them as close to the very front as we could. Our cows had their horns in the spaces between the panel bars (and yours probably wouldn't have much of an issue because her horns look more upright than ours are).

 

[laughingllama75]

Hey, good pic! zI never think to get pics of the "workings" of things. I guess I better start. Generally, the camera is the last thing on my mind when I am doing those sort of things. LOL. Thanks for explaining it better.

 

[amysflock]

Thanks! I like to take a lot of photos to document daily farm life on my blog. I really wanted photos of the vet visit, but there was no time, so I had to make do with these photos of the setup we used after the vet was gone.

 

[farmy]

awesome, we could do something like that in our cow shelter! Thanks for the pics!

 

[Robin2256]

ignore please. sorry, i'm new to this!