An electric fence and some ornery cattle

When we had to sell our deer, sheep and tractor we were left the problem of paddocks and no animals to eat the grass so we decided to let someone free graze it so that it didn’t get overgrown and start to look a might like deliverance.

Greg and Robin arrived with some calves and sheep and grazed away.  The animals seemed to flourish and we were all happy.  So the next year we both said yes to the deal again for another year.

This year we got a couple (well 4) of the calves, now yearlings, back to graze the paddocks again.  These wee beasts tested our fences and Steve’s patience, so much so that we asked Greg if we could borrow some sort of electric unit to stop them pushing the fences and making a break for it.  He kindly lent us a unit that Robin used for her horses, so pretty powerful.

Just near the end of the summer season, when we still had guests in the cabin, one evening we heard one of the cows bellowing and bellowing and bellowing.  We were in bed and thinking she would just stop, but no we could then hear the bellowing moving behind the house….so she had gotten out of the electrified paddock? Surely not!  It was Sunday night and the time was 2am Monday morning.  Work in 5 hours!  Steve volunteered to get up and steer her back to the paddock.  She had different ideas and half an hour later Steve came back in and asked for my help.

OMG what a performance, she did not want to go through any of the gates he had opened for her to get her into any of the paddocks we had.  Instead she raced up the river and fosbry flopped over the fence and then raced up to another gate (as we had also moved the other yearlings to another paddock to try to entice her to go there instead of the one she came out of) and tried to jump over that.  The only shut gate we had on the place.  I was waiting up in another paddock to shut the gate after she had gone through, but that was still another half an hour to come, while Steve tried to get her back to the now open gate she had run into earlier.  If it wasn’t that hour of the morning it would have be laughable.

Needless to say we finally got them all into the one paddock with a deer fence and went back to bed.