The Bull is Where? Doing What?

If you've been reading the blog thus far you know that we have 4 Angus cows - three steers and one bull. (We had two and two but, after a rather traumatic vet visit, were left with three steers and only one bull.) They have been progressing quite nicely, growing and maturing. Sorry to say they won't be around too much longer - and after Monday's events, if it were up to me, the bull may not be around much past this weekend.

Our field's fence line runs the length of our property and borders our neighbor's field completely on that one side. Our 4 cows are penned off the front of our property (where the horse is located), but they still have access to about 1000' of the neighbor's fence line. And, the neighbors just happen to have two very cute, fuzzy, sweet, pure-bred Scottish Highland heifers that our young boys (particularly the bull) think are very, very pretty! One can see where this is going....

Todd got the call Monday morning. "Your bull is in our field." So, he headed for home where my dad met him to help wrangle the bull back in to our pasture. By the time they arrived, however, the bull was quite upset because due to an obvious miscalculation on his part he had pushed through the fence and landed in a pasture completely devoid of other bovine. He was one pasture down from the girls and one over from his boys. And pissed apparently. He tried pushing back through the fence he came through but gave up after he got tangled (more pissed). I mean, you don't just walk up to a 1200lb bull and slip the halter on him and head back to the farm!

From what I understand my dad had a can of grain trying to seduce him through the gate in the back of our neighbor's property, into the un-fenced woods and through the gate back into our property. The bull got pissy with my dad and charged at him but, eventually gave in and followed the grain back to our field.

Now, when I found out what had happened everything had already been taking care of. My response was to shoot the bull. #1: He's just getting to be too big to "play like I'm going to charge you" and #2: In my opinion: once a fence wrecker - always a fence wrecker. Todd has a certain softness for the bull and convinced me "It's not his time yet." I was under the impression we had just bought a pure bred Scottish Highland cow about to calve a 1/2 Scottish, 1/2 Angus calf. Mmm. Sounds expensive. Had it not been for the obvious, glaring ineptitude of our cow we may have bought one of those. I've always insisted that any animal that can (and does!) put it's own tongue all the way up it's own nose may not be the brightest bulb in the box, ya know? Looks like my intuition may have paid off this time.

We had a few minor fencing repairs that evening - most notably the fact that we didn't have power down that side of the fence - and we're 3 days with no escapes. We all lived...this time.

I'm going to look into it, but my mom thinks just maybe two registered cows of different varieties might make a calf that's twice as expensive as a stand-alone Angus or Highland. Perhaps?