The cow thread

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When I worked on a farm (cattle/sheep) in Esperance Western Australia sometimes we would hand weed the Lupins.
I mean pull them out. They were not a crop, just a patch in the middle of a paddock.
One time I was out there alone, pulling lupins when all the cattle came over to see what I was doing.
There I was, pulling lupins with 250 Simmental cows and 1 Bull standing around wondering what this interloper was doing in their paddock.
A fine afternoon that one. :)
 
New Zealand teenager did not have a horse so she rode her cow instead.

As a child, Hannah Simpson always wanted a horse. She didn't get one. But the New Zealand teenager decided she wouldn't let that stop her from riding. Instead she mounted her cow, Lilac.
The rest is history. Hannah Simpson, 18, told As It Happens guest host Helen Mann about riding, and even jumping, bareback on her cow.

"Hannah, how does one ride a cow?"
"I just jumped on and rode her. It's kind of like a horse, I guess, except she's slow and it's a slightly different motion."

"What made you decide to start riding a cow like it was a horse in the first place?"
"I didn't have a horse. I'd always wanted to ride. I was reading stories about little girls riding their horses on ranches in America.
I think it was a dare from my younger brother to ride, so I just jumped on her and expected to get bucked off, but she just trotted forward and then stopped. I thought, 'Oh, we can do this!' She's not going to buck me off. She doesn't mind. So I just went from there. I started doing things with her, taking her for rides, and she listened to me really well."

"You have posted videos on your Instagram account of you riding this cow who's leaping over things. It's pretty unusual. What kind of response do you get from people when they see you riding by?"
"People usually just glance over, like, 'Oh, she's riding a … Wait, no, she's riding a cow!' And then they usually come over, like, 'So why are you riding a cow? This is really crazy. What made you ride a cow?' They ask a few questions like that.
I was riding my cow up the road. Actually, I was riding my other little cow. My younger brother, who took the photos and videos, he was riding Lilac.
This lady saw us and stopped us and said, 'Oh my goodness, this is so amazing!' She was talking to me for a bit. And she said, 'We've got a wee horse at home that we need to get rid of. Would you like him?' I went back home and was like, 'Mom, can we please have a horse? I've really wanted one for ages.' She said OK. Dad wasn't so keen, so it took a while to convince him. But they both really like the horse."
 

Hero farmer's incredible technique saves baby cow that wasn't breathing when it was accidentally born underwater in a dam on his property in South Australia.
Bryan Littlely was roaming his 100-acre property in Back Valley, South Australia when he noticed one of his cows in distress while giving birth, and knew it needed help — but it was his interesting technique that found him internet fame in the days that followed.

Explaining how it unfolded, the farmer told Yahoo News Australia he first noticed the troubled animal on a drone that he'd been flying overhead. Wasting no time, he and his wife rushed up the hill to where the struggling cow was birthing and attempted to pull the calf out by its legs.
During the troubling ordeal, the mother "got up and took off" straight into the nearby dam. Eventually, the calf slipped out but dropped about a metre underwater, meaning it was unable to take its first breaths.

"The first thing we did was once I managed to get to it was pick it up and give it a whizzy. I thought it was dead to be honest," Littlely said. "The calf had pretty much been trapped for a few hours. So it was really touch and go."
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Farmer Bryan Littlely leapt into action with the 'whizzy' technique to save the baby cow.
During the troubling ordeal, the mother "got up and took off" straight into the nearby dam. Eventually, the calf slipped out but dropped about a metre underwater, meaning it was unable to take its first breaths.
"The first thing we did was once I managed to get to it was pick it up and give it a whizzy. I thought it was dead to be honest," Littlely said. "The calf had pretty much been trapped for a few hours. So it was really touch and go."
A "whizzy" refers to an old farming technique which involves holding the animal by its legs and swinging it around in circles. Littlely learned it from his father, who was also a farmer, and said it helps to clear its airways by releasing any "gunk" or water that prohibits breathing — and in this instance, the miracle trick worked wonders.
In the video, the dad-of-one can be seen spinning the calf in circles before laying her lifeless body on the grass. He then "massaged her throat a bit" and "gave it a second whizzy". He was about to "give it a blow like CPR" he said, when suddenly the baby cow took a breath.

"You got to intervene and pull those calves out of the mums, because otherwise you lose both the mum and the calf. That's not a very nice way to go," the Aussie dad explained to Yahoo. "My wife took off to get the mum because she took off. But it took me about 4 or 5 minutes to really get the calf going again."
Littlely said he was "pretty surprised" the little one made it and said, really, "she should be dead". But thanks to the "whizzy" it wasn't.

"It's nothing new, farmers do it all the time," Littlely said of the little trick he used to save its life. But more surprising was the viral status the video earned after he shared it on Facebook on Saturday.
"There was two and a half thousand views at lunchtime on Saturday, and I thought 'that's cool'. But when I checked back a little later it'd reached 220,000 and it just took off overnight and had 1.6 million by morning," he said.

Thankfully, the "sweet little" calf, which he affectionately called Lucky Ducky, is "doing well" and is already doing laps around the paddock with her pals.
 

Cows in the Lake Sculptures​


The Cows in the Lake sculpture represents a bygone era of Oatlands, (Tasmania) local resident, Don Fish recalls first seeing the cows in the lake while attending the former Oatlands Primary School during the late 1940s, early 1950s; a time when village residents would pay 10 shillings per year to the Council to enable their milking cows, usually a Jersey Cross, to roam the back streets of Oatlands.
A Council registration tag was fitted to a collar worn around the cow’s neck to show that the cow had the right to roam the village.
The cows would graze on the grassy verges during the day, this roaming extended to entering Lake Dulverton in search of the native grasses which grow there.

Fifteen to twenty cows would enter the lake after grazing the verges, near disappearing until their hooves were barley touching the bottom of the lake, with only the top of their rump, shoulders and head visible as the cows would eat the native grasses. When school finished at the end of the day, the children whose parents owned a cows roaming the village would find the cow, tether her up and return her home to be milked. The cows would be kept in the home yard overnight, the next morning they were milked before being let back out to the streets to roam once again.

This is a story that is reminiscent of the bush poets Henry Lawson or Andrew Barton ‘Banjo’ Paterson, relating to Australian rural life in a bygone era. One can only imagine how they would have crafted stories and poetry around this Oatlands tale.
Maria Weeding from the historic property ‘Weedington’ which fronts Lake Dulverton stated that the Hereford cattle from ‘Weedington’ also dined on the native grasses in the lake up until the early 1980s.

Cows in the Lake Sculptures | Southern Midlands Council
 
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Cattle droving in Tassie' spectacular wild central highlands​

Driving cattle into Tasmania’s central highlands has been done for about 130 years; first by the Lee family and now the Kilby and Wadley families are continuing the tradition.
The drive starts almost smack-bang in the middle of Tasmania, on the edge of the Cradle Mountain – Lake St Clair National Park, following the Mersey River up to Lees Paddocks.
Early every year the families take off into the highlands to drive a small number of cattle into greener paddocks owned by Judy Kilby.
 
The Long Paddock is the colloquial term for the stock routes that cross Australia - open stretches of unfenced land that anyone can use to move stock in times of drought.
The grass verge of a public road, used as a source of pasture for cattle or sheep in times of drought.
7 minute video

On the stock route: 18,000 head of cattle travel 1,600kms over the long paddock from Queensland to New South Wales​

 
I hope I’m not repeating myself. When I was in high school, I worked on my friend’s family farm. It was a huge farm. His dad even bought the farm next to his after the owner had died and the kids decided to sell it and divide the money.

We were driving the cows from the one pasture to another pasture when one of the other hands saw one of the cows were laying down and wouldn’t get up, so the Vet was called. I was told to stay with the cow until the Vet arrived. It was kind of strange to me, not being raised in a farm, but the bull would not leave also. He stood about 20 yards away and just kept looking at me.

When the Vet showed up, he told me to keep an eye on the bull. I wasn’t sure what was going on, until he told me the bull was doing his job by protecting the cow. The bull would edge closer every few minutes and we both started getting nervous. I asked the vet what was wrong with the cow and he told me she had just delivered a calf and was calcium deficient. He had to give her two bags of liquid calcium. (I didn’t know how much was in each bag.)

After maybe 20 minutes, the cow was able to get up and I led both the cow and the bull back to the barn. The other cows were grazing over in the other field, but the Vet had told me not to separate the cow and bull and to put them both in the barn. He said to feed the cow some alfalfa hay and the bull just wanted to stand guard over the cow. I never saw a bull act like this bull did.

They were all Holsteins. They are usually a low temperament cow, which the bull was. Once the cow was placed into her stall, the bull was satisfied and walked away. The foreman brought her calf from the calf pens back to her and she seemed to perk right up. Normally, we pulled the calf’s from their mothers within a day or two after their birth, but to aid in her recovery, the foreman and the Vet both thought she should have her calf. She was then allowed to keep her calf.

I always enjoyed my time on the farm. The older men taught me a lot, not just about farming, but about life.
 


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