Jeff, The Bull Raiser

For months we been trying to decide what to do with the bulls. Should we send them both to the live stock market, or send one to a butcher? They are really growing now and with it being summer and all the pretty little cows down the road, I've been worrying about the 2 AM phone call..."Your bulls are in my cow pasture..."

The cows have been a learning experience, probably one of those things, we're glad we did it, but probably not the right thing for us. We aren't set up for it, we don't have crowding pens or shuts, they won't fit in our cute little 1970's horse trailer, and they got really big!!

After weighing a lot of negatives and positives, we decided to send them to the auction and not fool with butchering one. They are bulls, and Jeff read lots of info about the effect of testosterone on meat quality and taste, it wasn't worth it to us to spend the money on something that might not be very good.

Jeff arranged for Stacey and Steve (the people who have our momma donkey Claire) to bring their stock trailer up and take the bulls to the auction. This sounded feasible. Jeff got the bulls up in the round pen after he got home from work. We waited for Steve to get here. We planned on putting some feed in the trailer and shooing the bulls into the trailer. Go figure, bulls don't shoo!!

We've watched these bulls for 9 months. We bought them at 6 months of age (about 500 pounds each, now they are around 1200). They play a little, mostly they butt heads and see who can push who across the pasture. The Brahma/Angus cross likes to act brave and shake his head and snort at Jeff when he's on the tractor. But other than that, these bulls move slow and we figured they would shoo.

The last thing they wanted to do was get in a trailer. They ran around the round pen, bucked, pawed the ground, and stomped. Jeff and Steve chased after, blocked, and mostly tried to stay away from them. Jeff kept saying, "This isn't going very well."

I gave Steve a buggy whip and Jeff had a riding crop trying to use them as props to block and direct the bulls (we're set up for horses not cattle). After a lot of stomping and running, we've attracted more attention, the four-legged kind. Lined up along the fence, watching all this commotion were two horses, a donkey, and three goats. The looks on their faces said, "We don't ever want to go where these bulls are going." You can get the image. If we didn't really want to get rid of them, it was quite funny.

Finally we stopped the chasing; it wasn't working. These are pretty calm bulls, they've got fed every day, they get bread and bun treats, they get petted, they've been acclimated to us being around outside all the time, they have horse and donkey friends, and they lay in the grass under the tree watching us fool with the little goats. They have NEVER been chased.

Jeff got the idea to use the round pen as a crowder. He and Steve started bringing in the sides, slowly pushing the bulls to the front, towards the trailer. They ended up with a long shut aimed for the trailer door.

Jeff and I started talking to the bulls. My mom says we have this distinctive "voice" when we're talking to our animals. I'm sure Steve, an experienced stock man and someone we don't know very well, thought we were those goofy kind of people. I can hear him telling his farmer friends, "You should have heard these two people talking to the bulls!" I mean who talks sweetly to bulls. I'm sure we resembled Maureen O'Hara and Juliet Mills, talking and whistling for Vindicator, the bull, in the Jimmy Stewart film, The Rare Breed.

We kept talking to the bulls, like we always do, and they calmed down. With the round pen getting smaller and crowding them, they jumped right up in the trailer. I tried not to think about them ending up in the slaughter house as the trailer pulled out of the drive.

I got a call from Jeff about 40 minutes later, excitement in his voice. He told me the guy at the auction place said multiple times, "Those are the nicest bulls I've seen in a long time, they won't end up at the slaughter house, some farmer will buy them to breed to his heifers."

I'm so proud of my husband! It was a lot of hard work, the learning curve was steep and never ending, yet he ended up raising two bulls destined to father the next Angus steaks you get at the grocery!!!