The Laughter Herd: Poor Lonely Batman!!

I helped Brad and Shana sell the Longhorn mamas last week and the guy came to get them yesterday. That was quite a fun ordeal! Wish I would have grabbed the camera and a saddle! Working cows bareback is kinda hard...would have been harder trying to document! We had thought we would pull the hay trailer out of the barn and get the cows in there to load them....NO GO The mommas wanted nothing to do with that barn...no matter how much feed and coaxing we did. Batman would go in and out (maybe he knew what was going on!) So we ran them into our rather large pen with trees and stuff for them to hide around, but the only place that would work. We need a working pen with chutes! So we block any opening and back the trailer up to a small opening. Shana in the Gator, me on Apache (what a good old man), and Chad on foot. We try for Dottie first. This was not a real big trailer and probably shouldn't have had all three in there. In our many attempts to get Dottie we decided the front of the trailer was slightly larger than the back half and that 2 would go in front (original plan was Dottie and Winnie, because poor Red is our fav and she gets picked on) and Red would go in the back. So after many failed attempts at Dottie, Emily came out with feed and coaxed Winnie into a small corral type area Chad and the buyer made in front of the trailer. Well with feed involved Red had to check it out! We get Winnie up front and shut that gate, the we get Red in the back. We attempt to open the middle gate and put her up front with Winnie...there is no room for her to turn and open the gate! What to do what to do! So the buyer has a rope (none of us can rope by the way...so we didn't use it for its intended use!) that we put around Red's horns and around a large pole in the ground and back her out. Chad goes in and gets Winnie by the horns and they come out and stand in a corner until we can get Red up front. We tie Red to the front so Chad can get Winnie back in. While getting Winnie back in she feels the urge to poop (when stressed cattle get the runs) and turn at the same time flinging nice runny poo on all around! Chad man handles Winnie back in! While working with Red and Winnie, Shana and Emily work on getting Dottie closer to the area. We have the buyer's wife hold a bag of feed outside the trailer, since nobody can get close to the back of the trailer with Dottie checking things out! We don't want to scare her! Dottie walks right in to check things out! So the guy got there at 8:30 am and we were trying to convince the girls to go in the barn! No luck! We got back to the house to wash poo off and get to work with other projects for the day (Shana laying tile in her house, she moves in by Thursday! Chad working on the back deck of Shana's house) at 10:15ish so not even 2 hours to load 3 longhorns into a rather small trailer without a working pen and chutes! Not to bad!

So in memory here are some pictures of the Longhorns and their past calves!

Dottie