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Author’s note: This blog is about a real cow – “Old Number 5” – on my family’s ranch northwest of Kaycee, Wyoming. While the cow’s “thoughts”and feelings are obviously conjecture, the day-to-day activities and movements of this cow are real. We will follow her throughout the year to all of the pastures she grazes, and she will give her “opinions” about all of them and the happenings within her herd. My family and I expend a lot of time, energy, and resources to make sure the cattle have plenty to eat, fresh, clean water to drink, and are, for lack of a better phrase, Happy Cows. Please keep in mind that my intentions for this blog are not to “humanize” cows – or any other animal – but merely to provide a look into what a typical cow here at Brock Livestock Company goes through in a given year, and her possible “opinions” about things.
The first day of August brought a little bit of excitement for all of us – our ranchers turned the bulls in with us cows! That first day the bulls arrive is always pretty crazy; they spend a lot of their time bellering and blowing, which some of my frisky herdmates think is pretty neat. So, it usually turns into big, chaotic scene of bellering bulls, cows running all around trying to figure out what is going on and find their babies, and of course the calves thinking it is all great fun as they run to and fro enjoying the melee! But, like all “first days”, by afternoon the novelty of the bulls had worn off and things were pretty much back to normal for all of us.
We spent the first half of August finishing up our grazing of the irrigated meadows, and by the middle of the month, we were all eager to head for the mountain. On the 16th, our ranchers moved all of us from the meadow pasture to a pasture near the foot of the mountain – a little over 1 mile. That was the longest single leg of our move, and from there we just pretty much moved ourselves on up the mountain. They opened the gates for us, and some of us “ more experienced ” cows took our babies and climbed the slope. Some of the younger cows who haven’t been up here much had to be moved up by our ranchers later on and shown where the water is, but a good portion of us came up on our own. We just love it up here – there is good grass, nice cool weather (and plenty of shade trees if it does get hot), and our ranchers have installed plenty of drinking tanks for us full of cool, clear mountain spring water. I’ve often wondered why it is that our ranchers send us up here to spend the summer while they stay down below in the heat and the flies...but I’m certainly glad that they do!
Even though this is the sixth calf that I’ve raised, I am just constantly amazed by how much they grow and change over the course of the summer. She is nearly 4 months old now and well over 250 pounds. She still relies on me and my milk for a lot of her nutrition, but she is eating more and more grass now and will sometimes spend a good portion of the day on her own. She always comes and finds me around dusk, and truth be told, I always have a pretty good idea of where she is, so if I need to find her right away I can.
-Jason Williams, Brock Livestock (Jason is one of the valued partner ranchers raising cattle for Tallgrass)
