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Keeping a Mama Cow a Mama Cow

Keeping the mother in a cow

An animal can only have its mind in one main place at a time. 

A cow being an animal that finds safety and comfort in the herd learns to always have their mind on the herd and its mental state of being. 

Fear and anxiety in the herd puts a single animal on the same mindset, and creates the feeling of going with the herd for safety and comfort.  This is great and good almost all of the time, except when there is a newborn that can’t travel at the speed of the herd. 

In this case the mother is forced to decide where to put her mind, with the herd or the newborn. Even if they decide to stay, they don’t do as good of a job mothering as when the herd is calm because they keep going back and forth to staying or going. 

This is why it is so important for us as stockman to create a mindset in our herd to learn to respond to the pressure created by the handler. This only can happen through pressure and release of pressure to help the animal to learn to respond properly. 

This happens with three pressures. Driving, drawing and maintaining pressures. 

It is easy to understand driving pressure, but it is never ending learning at how to get the driving pressure more effective. 

Drawing is the same. Easy to understand shaking a feed bucket and the animal comes to you. There is so much more to it, and you really need to work at it if you want to get animals to understand coming to you without a feed reward, and if using a feed reward, having the driving pressure to control the draw. 

Maintaining pressure is what we are talking about with the herd. They don’t want to leave or go, but wait to respond to your pressure as a draw or a drive, and think their way to the transition without over responding. You create the intensity of the response. That’s when we can control our animals to respond the way we need to get our desired results. 

Just like the horse I am riding, if I can’t control the speed and mind of the horse, and the intensity of the pressure it creates to the animals I am connecting with, I won’t be able to communicate as effectively as I need. 

These videos show cows with new calves that can keep their mind on the new born, but also respond to my pressure and the draw of the herd. 

Stop the front feet!

Here are more thoughts on animal behavior and keeping them content and get the most out of environment and feed available for weight gain and reproduction. 

I look at having cattle that are right in the mind is to have animals that respond when pressured, and have their needs in mind when pressure is off. 

I have been real interested in getting the most out of my horses, but still getting them to relax and get still and content when my pressure comes off, but be ready to respond without over responding when asked. You can call this a part of feel. They feel my pressure, or read what I want. 

The way to achieve this is to separate the pressures so they understand how torespond to the pressures. When you ask animals to stop, if you teach them to stop the front feet instead of the whole body, this lets them think their way to a stop and that’s when animals learn, because they take the pressure of themselves. 

If you are working with a herd, stop the leaders front feet and then the next leaders and the herd will stop their front feet, then their body, then the whole bunch. 

When you are out in front to stop their front feet, then you are in a position to step in any direction to create movement in the direction you want to point them, you are in position to point the nose of the animal where you want it to go and the feet and body will follow. 

It doesn’t take long if you are consistent and get the response that the animal understand what you are asking or needing, and they learn to respond to it easier and more consistently. 

This is how you get animals good to handle and not getting in the habit of ignoring the human for feed or going with other animals. They know that you know how to be in control. Very important. 

When you get animals to understand your approach to them that is not asking them to leave, by using flat angles with low energy towards the animal they learn to wait for you, just like a horse that’s good to catch. 

This allows you to look at the animals in a normal state that they show the true state of health and contentment. Then you can position yourself to create movement and start the lead to where you want to go. 

It’s very good to see animals get up and stretch and look at you. If when you approach the animals run off you have to catch up to get direction, and they are in a mindset to get away rather than respond to your pressure. This is much different than animals that learn through pressure and proper release of it. 

The other side is animals that run you over and won’t stop. This is what happens when you take the fence down or offer a treat. They get out of balance and your presence and pressure have no meaning. This is when you stop their front feet and make them wait, then turn them away and drive them to learn about responding to pressure. 

These are all very rewarding things for me, and I think for you as well. First of all for safety and profit. Second, the training of animals to respond to you has been such a spot of pleasure for the human, mostly with dogs and horses, but it might as well happen with your grazing animals as well. 

Here are a couple clips that might give you some ideas on helping achieving this. 

Stockmanship for Grazing

I’ve been grazing cattle for a long time, in lots of different climates and lots of different systems. Management of grazing has been around since biblical times, and even from different climates from brittle arid desert to wet jungle or irrigated pastures. 

Being able to control time of grazing, impact of grazing, and rest/recovery of roots and stem and leaf amount for faster recovery is what we are trying to achieve with a managed grazing program or system. 

Controlling movement of the animals is the main focus with grazing to achieve this. If you are using a machine to harvest it’s easy to control these things if the terrain allows it. 

Some topography doesn’t allow for the use of machines, and there is always expense involved with mechanical harvesting. 

With animals we can control movement with fencing, tethering animals or herding, usually at less expense. 

Labor can become a big expense.  An example is herding sheep. Most large sheep operations have herders in rough country that is to difficult to fence.  A band of sheep is usually around 1000 ewes. That’s 250 animal units.  It requires a herder that lives with the sheep full time and a camp tender to keep the herder in supply’s and moving camp to new feed. It is very nigh labor cost to animal units.  There are two things that are needed, herding animals for grazing management and predation control. A good herder creates their value by achieving high gains with content animals on good forage and low death loss from sickness and predators.  I’ve seen first hand on the same range, same sheep and same management and how the skills of the herder creating much better total weight of lambs weaned from one band to the next. 

As a grazing manager Stockmanship plays a crucial role. Gentle animals that are content in the environment, and not wanting to be somewhere else, that spend there time taking bites and feeding gut bugs, ruminating in a comfortable place and have good water availability will preform to the best of their genetic potential. 

This is so important to understand. If you break things down in the simplest forms of what an animal needs, it makes it easier to understand how important the stockmanship component is. 

To put is simple, gentle animals that are content get fat if they have appropriate nutrition. 

My young years were spent with cattle that always were wanting to be moved. My grandfather’s cattle were fat, but we didn’t get the most use of pasture because when the cows told my grandfather they wanted to move they got moved. They were content because they always got what they wanted. 

It was such a great thing for me to learn from, and helped me to have the desire to control the mind of animals to get the most from them, and give them the best quality of life.