Those Ain’t Handles

Check out this stunning dude, WOW -

And his ladies -

Just down the highway and can often been seen out in the field grazing from 11e, so cool!

Yes, female Texas Longhorns do have horns too! In fact, female Longhorns often grow longer and thinner horns than males.

The horns are for natural defense but also to help regulate their body temperature, so now you know!

Either way these are stunning animals, especially seeing them up close!

Name The Breed

Can you tell me the breed of cattle in the picture below?!

Very unique markings, so easy to identify.

It's a Scottish breed.

Established as a separate breed in 1921.

Known for their maternal ability and high quality beef.

They're well adapted to cold and rugged climates

The answer is:

Belted Galloway Cattle!

**Photo cred to Emilie Frye

Bovine Information

For your reading pleasure. You never know when information like this might come in handy.

• Young cattle are called calves.
• A young female before she has calved is called a 'heifer'.
• A young female that has had only one calf is sometimes called a "first-calf heifer."
• A young male is a "bullock." The term "bullock," or "steer," is also used to denote a castrated male, unless kept for draft purposes, in which case it is called an "ox" (plural "oxen"), not to be confused with the related wild musk ox.
• If castrated as an adult, it is called a "stag."
• An intact male is called a "bull."
• An adult female who has had more than two calves is called a "cow."
• The adjective applying to cattle is "bovine".

An ox is nothing more than a mature bovine with an "education." The education consists of the animal's learning to respond appropriately to the teamster's (ox driver's) signals. These signals are given by verbal commands or by noise (whip cracks) and many teamsters were known for their voices and language. In North America, the commands are:

(1) get up
(2) whoa
(3) back up
(4) gee (turn to the right)
(5) haw (turn to the left)

Oxen must be painstakingly trained from a young age. Their teamster must make or buy as many as a dozen yokes of different sizes as the animals grow. A wooden yoke is fastened about the neck of each pair so that the force of draft is distributed across their shoulders. From calves, oxen are chosen with horns since the horns hold the yoke in place when the oxen lower their heads, back up, or slow down (particularly with a wheeled vehicle going downhill). Yoked oxen cannot slow a load like harnessed horses can; the load has to be controlled downhill by other means. The gait of the ox is often important to ox trainers, since the speed the animal walks should roughly match the gait of the ox driver who must work with it.

See previous post dated Tuesday, June 12, 2007 titled, "Cattle".

Simple Mathematics

Food for thought, item #1 plus item #2 = item #3 below -

Item #1:

Cow Takes Dip In Backyard Pool

Item #2:
Bull Shit

Item #3:
*Cement Pond

* Just want to reassure you that the formula above is NOT the cause of our cement pond issues.

Cattle

One of these guy's is the producer of said "Bull Shit" from previous post...

Perhaps, if I we had Mike Rowe here from the Discovery Channel's program "Dirty Jobs" he could tell us exactly which one is responsible for said "BS" but we don't and can only speculate. You'd have to be a fan of the show to understand what I am referring to and even then it might not make sense but who give a (bull) shit...

Actually, these dudes belong to a buddy of mine. Many of them were bought as calves still needing to be bottle feed. That was in the late winter, early spring. They're all doing fine now, eating on their own and growing like weeds. He spent quite a bit of time bottle feeding these guys and as you can see it paid off.