Hobby Farm Animals. Chris McLaughlin
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can be made by tying a gate handle onto the wire and adding a loop at the far gatepost to hook the handle through.
It’s not necessary to have water available in the pasture. Cattle will walk a long way to get water, even when there’s snow on the ground, and that’s usually good for them and their hooves. Cattle need regular exercise to stay healthy, and they can be a little lazy about it. Some producers still rely on snow to water their cattle in the winter, but it’s difficult for them to get enough to stay fully hydrated. Eating snow also chills them, and they’ll lose weight burning calories to stay warm.
Salt and Minerals
Salt is essential to cattle, and the best way to make sure that they get enough is to provide free-choice loose salt in a feeder protected from rain and snow. Buy or build a two-compartment feeder and put salt in one side and a mineral mix geared for your area in the other side.
Mineral deficiency used to be a common cause of disease in cattle. The diseases varied from region to region, depending on what was deficient in the soils. That’s why it’s important to get a mix formulated for your area of the country. As with salt, it’s easier for cattle to get enough minerals when the mix is loose rather than in a block.
For steers being finished for slaughter, getting enough minerals and vitamins into their feed is especially important. These can be mixed in the finishing ration according to your feed dealer’s directions or fed free-choice in a separate feeder as you would normally do with the cow herd. If fed free-choice, the vitamin and mineral mix should be freshened at least once a week.
| Poisonous Plants No matter where you live, chances are that some plants in your pasture could poison your cattle. Fortunately, though, most (though not all) poisonous plants taste icky. If your cattle have enough to eat, they probably won’t touch anything that’s bad for them. But if your pastures are stressed by drought or have been heavily treated with nitrogen fertilizer, or if it’s very early in the spring and the only plant that’s green is also poisonous, you should be alert for problems. Six different classes of poisons have been identified in various plants, the most important being the alkaloid and glycoside groups. Alkaloids affect the nervous system, causing loss of motor control, bizarre behavior, and death. Jimson weed, a common species of the western United States, is probably the best-known example of a plant that kills with an alkaloid poison. Glycosides basically cause death by suffocating cells. The animal is breathing, but the oxygen in the bloodstream is blocked from being transported into the individual cells. The buttercup, which brightens low pastures in early spring, is a familiar glycoside-containing plant. Other familiar plants that are dangerous to cattle include black locust, black nightshade, bracken fern, castor bean, curly dock, death camas, dogbane, horsetail, locoweed, lupine, milkweed (several species, but not all), oleander, pigweed, and tobacco. White snakeroot, common throughout the Midwest, causes the “trembles” in cattle and can kill humans who drink milk from cows grazing it. Thousands of settlers in the Midwest died of milk sickness in the early 1800s, including Nancy Hanks Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln’s mother. For more information, contact your local agricultural extension agent. |
Beef Cattle Behavior and Handling
Although they are not as bright as dogs and cats, cattle are intelligent in their own way. Usually good at taking care of themselves, they’ll find a windbreak when it’s cold and shade when it’s hot, and they’ll never forget where their calves are. While cattle learn more slowly than horses, they do quickly learn to come when called if you reward them with grain or a new pasture when they get there. And when they learn something, they never forget it—especially bad experiences, which is an important point to remember when you’re working cattle. When introduced to new experiences slowly and patiently, they’re also quite curious. If I walk into the pasture and sit down, I’m soon closely surrounded by a ring of sniffing cows, wondering what in the world I’m doing.
Cattle are not democratic. In every herd, there is a hierarchy, from the bossy top cow to the shy one at the bottom of the pecking order that always gets shoved away from the best feed. Dominance is determined by strength and aggressiveness, but it’s all kind of low key. Cows don’t fight so much as they test to see who can push whom around. You’ll sometimes see a pair of cows head-to-head, hooves planted, just pushing. The winner is the one that pushes hardest and longest. Cows will push around a young bull, too. (Don’t worry, he’ll get over it.)
Cows have different personalities. One of the delights of having a small herd of cattle is getting to know each cow on an individual level. Some are inherently nervous and will never let you get close. Some are docile and like their heads scratched, while others like to spend most of their time shoving everyone else around. Some are overprotective mothers, while others are lackadaisical about their calves. Most will nurse only their own calves, but a few will let any calves help themselves—kind of like those human mothers we fondly remember from our childhoods who would feed any of the neighborhood kids who happened to be around at dinnertime.
Some behaviors are common to all cattle. Because they are, and always have been, a prey species, cattle are hardwired to run at any sign of danger. Danger, to nervous cows, could be anything from a strange human in the pasture to a funny smell. They don’t stop to think about whether there is really a threat; they just take off. They’ll run right over you if they’re in a panic, and they panic fairly easily. For animals that are normally fairly slow moving and clumsy, they can move surprisingly fast when frightened or agitated, and they’ll jump gates and fences—or trample them.
Cattle would rather run than fight, but they will also fight if they have to. A cow will defend its calf; a bull that decides for some reason that a person is competition or a threat will charge and can kill that person. Although when kept with the cows, beef bulls will usually behave themselves and run away with the cows, they are naturally more aggressive than cows, and they are unpredictable. You can’t trust a bull not to charge you instead of running away. Never, ever, turn your back on a bull.
As a prey species, cattle learned long ago that there is safety in numbers. They graze in a group because it’s easier for a group to spot and defend itself against predators than it is for a single animal. The herding instinct is not completely dominant, however. Groups of two or three will wander off, although usually not too far, from the main herd in pursuit of some promising grazing.
If the pasture is large enough, cows prefer to go off by themselves to calve and may remain away for a day or two before returning with their new babies. Cows also use babysitters. Often, you’ll see a single cow watching over a group of calves while all of the other mothers are off grazing and, I presume, gossiping.
Shelter
Cattle tolerate an amazing range of weather conditions and do fine outside year-round in nearly all climates. There are a few times, however, when they should have some sort of shelter. In the “ice belt” (those states between the snowbelt and the no-snowbelt), where there can be months-long stretches of damp, almost-freezing weather, cattle are healthier and happier if they can get out of the mud and the wet. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy; an old shed open on one side or an old barn bedded with old hay, straw, or sawdust will work. However, you’ll need to borrow or rent a skid steer with a bucket to clean the place out in the spring.
Cold winds can be hard on cattle, too. If you can arrange a place where they can get out of the wind, they’ll do much better. This can be anything from a belt of trees to the side of a building. Extremely hot weather is also tough on most types of cattle, so having shade available, again either under trees or near a building, makes a big difference to them.
Most types of existing outbuildings can be converted into indoor cattle handling facilities.
Handling Facilities
Cows