If Bison Chased Horses & Cattle Chased Rabbits

Why are equines the only grazing animal which seemingly enjoys chasing and dominating other grazing animals? This is a question which has baffled me for years (actually decades) yet it is an important aspect of animal behavior that people seem to miss. I bring this up because of a recent discussion on bison.

I know there are a lot of people out there who are going to counter with “My bison charge anyone on horseback,” but the simple fact is, they aren't. If they were, cutting horse trainers would not risk using bison to tune up show horses worth tens, if not hundreds of thousand of dollars. So why does a herd of bison “charge” people who are horseback? Curiosity.

When confronted with something new, grazing animals are generally either afraid or curious. If they are afraid, they will watch cautiously or flee. If they are curious they will go see what it is. If one or two of a group of grazing animals get curious about something and start running towards it, the whole herd will follow.

In the case of a horseman being “charged” by a bison herd, it is a case of a few of the animals being curious enough about something to run over to check it. The rest of the herd follows. The first thing that pops into the rider's mind is panic, which transfers immediately to the horse. Horse and rider vacate the premises with the bison following trying to see what the heck that strange thing is.

Cattle will do the same thing. A person walking across a field full of yearling heifers who are not used to seeing a person afoot, will come stampeding right up to the person and if the person runs, they will keep following. If the person stops, so do the heifers, but they may come close enough to them to sniff them.

Once I had a steer in a little group of five hundred that was insanely curious about rabbits. One morning all five hundred were running around the pivot, as a herd. I could see noting they were chasing so I rode to that pivot to check it out. When I got there they were all stopped in a big circle. When I got to the middle, the one steer was standing on a jack rabbit's leg while he was licking it. Other than standing on a leg to pin it down the steer was not doing anything aggressive towards the rabbit. On the contrary, he was grooming it!

This was not a one time affair with this steer. In the several months I had this group of cattle, I had to move them back and forth across some desert ground to some remote pivots. This steer was naturally in the lead, and whenever a rabbit jumped up in front of him, he'd take off chasing the rabbit.

There is a similarity between the rabbits being chased by that steer, and riders being chased by bison. Instead of thinking about what was really going on, they both ran like heck to get out of the way. All the bison are wanting to do is check you out, and all that steer was wanting to do was give the rabbit a bath.

The point to all of this is that bison can be worked horseback. You have to put some thought into it and acclimate them first. After all, if bison choused horses, Indians would have ridden bison and lived in horse hide teepee. 

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Getting Feedlot Cowboys On The Low Stress Bandwagon

There is no doubt that the industry leaders are interested in having low stress cattle handling method being the industry norm rather than the exception. I am no sycophantic elocutionist, all I can do is call things like I see them. Unless there is a direct benefit to the average pen rider , cowboy or ranch hand, they are not going to see the benefit in changing how they work cattle. In order to get the rank and file pen riders and ranch hands wanting to excel in low stress cattle handling we need to do two things. First we need to show that low stress cattle handling is more efficient. Second we need to give them a reason to learn and practice it.

The best way to do this is through a series of competitions in realistic low stress cattle handling to be sponsored by BQA, with a sizable reward (as in cash and prizes) for the winners. This contest would entail riding pens just as if they were riding pens at work, only would be pulling cattle marked with paint balls. A model for the competition wold be;

1. Twenty pens to be ridden by each contestant with fifty marked animals to be pulled.
2. Each contestant starts with two hundred points.
3. A point would be subtracted for each animal that breaks out of a walk.
4. Two points would be subtracted for causing animals other than the one being pulled to move faster than a walk.
5. Each contestant would have one marked animal wearing a heart monitor. The contestant raising the hear rate of this animal the least would have ten points added to their score and the second lowest raise of heart rate would receive five points added to their score.
6. If a rider does not pull all of his marked cattle, they will have two points deducted from their score.
7. Rider will also have two points deducted for every unmarked animal pulled.
8. In case of a tie score, the fastest time wins.

While this would not be a spectator sport, it would give pen riders a reason to get interested in low stress cattle handling. If you were to check the death loss and medical costs in any feedlot, you will find that those numbers correlate directly to how cattle are being handled. The less stress being put on cattle, the lower the death loss and antibiotic costs will be. The more stress put on the cattle the higher those numbers will be. The last feedlot I worked at, I asked the hospital crew to run the numbers on all of the pen riders for a year so I could compare them. Between the person who cause the less stress, and the person who caused the least amount of stress, the cost difference was over $250,000. With that kind of losses going on, it seems as if a little prize money as incentive would be a cheap way to get more cowboys on the low stress band wagon.

To learn about my own intensive program for teaching low stress cattle handling in feedlots, visit my website.

The myth of “breed type disposition”

Herefords are thought of as being gentle, while Brahma, Limousine, and Saler, cattle are thought of by most cattlemen in this country as being harder to handle because of their disposition. The fact that they can be harder to handle has more to do with the frequency and methods used handling them than their actual disposition. Now that half of you are ready to tar and feather me, then run me off the cyber range, I have a couple of simple questions for you to ponder.

Why is it that the above mentioned breeds which many of us consider to have bad attitudes, considered to be gentle breeds in their country of origin? If Hereford cattle are so inherently gentle, then why are there areas with a lot of high headed Herefords that streak off across the pasture with a knot in their tail at the sight of a person on horseback?

I started wondering about those two questions over forty years ago. Twenty years ago I had the unique opportunity to halter break the show calves for a big registered outfit. Part of their show string was several Red Angus embryo transplant calves which were full brother/sister. One would think that the genetically inherent gentle nature of their breeding. Three of the calves were out of recip cows which were raised on the ranch. These mothers had been handled half right all of their lives and were fairly gentle. These three broke to lead fast and enjoyed the brushing and grooming. The recip cow for calf number four was a Hereford purchased from a neighboring ranch which culled her because she was too wild. Despite having identical genetics, she was harder to halter break, kept kicking when a person groomed her and ran away with the herdsman several times at the show. Long story short, she had been trained by her mother to be wild and obnoxious.

On the other end of the spectrum, several years ago I was sent a bunch of smooth mouth Santa Gertrudis cows for the winter. We were to calve them out and ship the mothers to the packers at weaning time. These cows came off a ranch where they gather mainly with helicopters. When they do use cowboys the man to cow ratio is usually around 1 to 20. When they came off the truck, half of them were hunting and ready to run over a man on foot, and would challenge a man on horseback. After working on settling them down a couple of hours we turned them out in a small trap.

When I started to gather the trap a few days later, all the cattle ran to the back corner and wadded up. Thinking it would be better to go out a gate and move them off the fence from the outside, I headed away from the cattle and towards a gate. Before making it to the gate,there was the screeching sound of breaking wire and the cattle were out and running out and running.

After only seven months of being handled with low stress methods, three of us penned over 500 of these cows, sorted the calves off the cows and shipped them. The cattle manager of the ranch owing the cows was amazed as he had never seen the cattle penned that easily or worked that quietly.

The moral of these examples is that how cattle are handled (and the frequency they are handled) affects the disposition and behavior of cattle as much as genetics.After working with tens of thousands of cattle, and watching people work them, it is easy to understand how there can be so much confusion on low stress cattle handling and understanding of cattle behavior. Our knowledge is only the sum of our actual experience combined with what we have learned through educational experiences. Until we observe cattle acting as a herd and without stress, our observations of cattle behavior will not be accurate as our base opinions are based upon faulty information.

For more information and clinics, visit http://www.naturalcattlehandling.com

Low Stress Cattle Handling/Horsemanship Clinics

You cannot substitute articles and videos on reduced stress cattle handling procedures for real time, hands on experience to become proficient at handling cattle. Few of these articles and videos address the differences involved between handling cattle on foot or on a horse. Fewer still describe how, by simply changing the angle of your horse's body in respect to the cow, you can control the cow's speed and direction.

For a person handling cattle horseback on a ranch, or riding pens in a feedlot, you cannot learn how to handle cattle in a reduced stress manner without including horsemanship. Low stress cattle handling is synonymous with good horsemanship, you can't have one without the other. While those teaching low stress cattle handling on foot concentrate on reading cattle and making small corrections to keep things going, many of those teaching it from horseback are still doing many of the same old things. Keeping a horse parallel to a cow, beating it to the fence and working, prey/predator relationship, and training cattle to drive.

The word natural is over used and often misconstrued. The way your cattle act right now is only their natural reaction to what you are doing. The key to low stress cattle handling is to do things in a manner which naturally gets cattle to doing what we want in a calm manner.

If we are driving a cow and keeping our horse parallel to the cow and decide we need to turn it, we start putting pressure on their eye to get them to turn away from us. When we do this we turn our horse towards the cow and they speed up and try go around us. We blame the cow for speeding up and trying to go around us, but we are the one who turned on that switch in the cow to get that reaction.

In the same situation if we are tracking the cow with a slight amount of lateral movement on our horse we can actually ask the cow to turn by taking pressure off the cow. We do this by asking our horse to speed up slightly while moving laterally away from the cow. When we do this, we are taking away both the instinct of the cow to speed up and to go around us. Instead the cow feels as if its opportunity to go around us is taken away. At this point, rather than being excited and wanting to get around us, the cow's reaction is to turn slowly (without stress) away from us and in the direction we want.

In order to take advantage of the above natural instinct of cattle, we need to develop our horsemanship to a higher level. At times we can slow a cow by simply changing the angle of our horse in relationship to a cow. Essentially, the better our horsemanship is, the more we can master low stress cattle handling. This isn't to say our horses have to be perfect, as there is no true perfection. However if we master our horsemanship enough we can take advantage of methods to handle cattle with lower amounts of stress, not only on the cattle, but on our horses and ultimately on ourselves. The easier you make things on the cow, the easier it is on your horse, and the easier it is on you.

The answer to the conundrum of how to learn both the horsemanship techniques and the lower stress reactions of cattle is to learn them both at the same time. After years of thought on the matter I have designed a clinic program which addresses both the horsemanship and low stress instincts of cattle. As learning all of this is intensive, hands on clinic sizes will be limited to a total of seven participants, including crew or owners of sponsoring ranches. To learn more of my methods and all these clinics cover visit my main website.

I am now accepting host ranches for 2012 clinics. If you are going to be running yearlings, coinciding a clinic when you receive cattle, they will be calm and easy to handle when you turn them out with no additional labor costs. If you are running an AI breeding program I can also include training on how and when to pen your cattle for minimum stress and optimum conception. If you would like to host a clinic, email me me and we will make arrangements.