Cowman Dressage

While "Cowboy Dressage" has turned into an arena event with no cattle, there is a reason behind doing dressage movements when working cattle. Holistic educator and low stress cattle handling clinician Guy Glosson has a saying, "You never get a second chance at a first approach."

While it is easy to make a mistake when approaching a cow to sort it off from the others, the real problem is not in the mistake, but in how we recover from it. In order to make a quick recovery, in a way that keeps the cattle calm. Having a horse that knows a little "Cowman Dressage" can go a long way in adjusting those first approach mistakes.

Handling cattle and riding a horse are two things which consist of a large amount of "intuitive feel." In order to be really good at either one, the more feel you have the better you will be. This feel is something most of us have to work at. We don't realize just how sensitive the the feel between us and the horses we ride can be. For those of us who are working cattle horseback, we often feel we don't have the time to work on it, but the fact is we pass up opportunities to work on our feel and focus nearly every time we get on a horse.

Day one of my clinics focus on developing feel and how to take advantage of our natural surroundings to build dressage movements in our horses. While we are doing this, we are also discussing cattle behavior and when to use different movements. Day two is applying these movements on cattle. These clinics are held in the pasture and limited to eight riders.
For more information on clinic dates, or to host a clinic, visit my main website.

Grazing the Impossible

   Since my last post, we changed our grazing plan to include grazing Giant Sacaton, which most people think cattle will not eat. There is more about that  on the Circle Ranch website.                

     Other than a problem with the water that had the cattle spread out, searching for water,  the cattle have been generally staying in the areas I put them. There were roughly 25% that did not like the Sacaton, so I pushed them on the side of a "hill" and let them work it. This "hill" is one of those areas which are left out of grazing plans because they are "too steep to graze.

    The owners of these cattle are amazed that these cattle are grazing this high as they have similar country which goes unused because the cattle refuse to graze it. All it took to get them to graze it was to start them up the hill very loose and let them work their own way up. Rather than putting pressure on the back, ride down the side of the cattle so that the ones in the back pick up and move with no pressure from the back. The feed is there and it is good enough that the cattle stay high and keep working. This will improve the hydrology from the top down by producing more feed when the rains come.

     The cattle are also starting to act more as a herd. In the picture below, the cattle are leaving water on their own. Notice how they are trailing out in single file, following the first animal to leave, and going back to where they were previously placed. There are approximately 180 head strung out up that trail.

In the video below, you will see the cattle grazing in the Giant Sacaton.  As we are having calves born nearly  everyday, when I make a pasture move I leave the gate open just in case a calf was left behind. None of the cattle went back.

In the next couple of weeks I will be grazing some more areas that are "too steep" to graze. In the meantime I hope everyone has a Merry Christmas. If you are still shopping for Christmas, there is time to order some of my books from Amazon in both paperback and kindle. They are available at 2lazy4U Livestock & Literary Company

Week Two of Holistic Herding on 32,000 Acres

One thing I want to emphasize before going any farther, is that instilling the herd instinct happens much faster when when using the same class of cattle in a herd, and all of the cattle arrive at the same time. This project is being done with the cattle coming in over a period of three to four weeks, and consisting of everything from open yearling heifers, to older dry cows, to week old pairs and calving cows.

Instilling the herd instinct in a mixed group of cattle like this is harder (but not impossible) as the younger open cows move out readily while the springers will move slower, and cows with young calves have to pick up their babies and can only move as fast as their calves. Never the less, The cattle are basically grazing the areas of the pasture they are being placed into.

As mentioned in last week's post, the weather threw a kink into the program when a cold front moved in ahead of a storm and the cattle drifted into the brush. Tracks showed that the cattle were staying together until one part of the herd hit a fork in the trail and split them into two bunches. Somewhere in the middle of the brush, part of the one group stopped while the other kept going into the next pasture, as the fence has been down in that area for years. As Monday was my day for changing pastures anyway, I gathered the draws and placed those cattle in the southwest corner of the new pasture. The following video shows how easy it is to gather in the brush and put the cattle through a gate and still have the cattle paired.

Because of the way things wound up the first week, and the move, the cattle are now in three groups, watering in three different places. Despite this, the cattle are still grazing in the same general area of the pasture, it just requires me to pick up each group off of their water point and place them. When they go to water, each group is going back to the water point they are familiar with. Despite the current stage in the training process, we are still getting the desired animal impact from concentrating the cattle as in the picture below.

When I make the move into the next pasture, the cattle will be placed into two groups on two different water points. The open cattle, cows in their first or second trimester, along with older pairs will be place on one water point, while the young pairs and cows ready to calve will be placed on a second water point. Because of their different rates of travel, this will be easy to accomplish as the first group will travel faster. I will have a person helping me on this move and one of us will simply bend the second group to one water point and hold them while the other continues with the other group to the desired water point. This will allow me to graze two different parts of the pasture simultaneously while working each with each group to get them to acting as a herd. The cattle will be in this pasture for 14 days before being mixed together as one herd. The move after the next pasture will be long, and up a steep grade. At this point the cattle will probably once again be ran as two herds in the same pasture. This would not be necessary if all of the cattle were open, or at approximately the same stage of pregnancy (or had the same age calves).

The optimum situation would have been to have all of the cows dry (or yearlings) and to have received them all at the same time. This would have shortened the training period from 4 to 5 (or 6) weeks to only a couple of weeks. However using different classes of cattle, receiving them over a period of 3 to 4 weeks, and training them in pastures with brush is allowing me to demonstrate that there are not many situations you cannot instill the herd instinct into cattle.