SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE WESTERNER

Pasture Bullies—who needs them?

By Julie Carter

It is in the news everywhere. Playground bullying is becoming a problem in schools across the nation. Magazine articles and books are being written about its affect and how to diffuse it.

Bullies pick on someone else as a way to get power, to get their way, or to feel important. Bullies hit, kick, or push to hurt people, and they sometimes do things to scare them. Some bullies threaten others or try to make them do things they don't want to do.

All the above clearly describes what happens in the pasture. The bovine version of the bully, generally just called a bull, is undoubtedly the single most aggravating facet of the cattle business. The cow-calf business is really the cow-calf and bull business.

It is a scientific fact that on some level, you have to have bulls. Even cattle operations that totally use artificial insemination for producing a calf crop still have to rely on someone, somewhere to have bulls.

To an outsider, they are indeed magnificent specimens of the breed. To the cowman, they are a necessary pain in the operation. The huge lumbering animals have one function and one only. When it is time for them to go to work in the spring, they trot off to the herd like love is in the air.

When the summers heat up, you can reliably find them shaded up under a cedar tree. They are usually in groups of two or three and presumably discussing their conquests of previous months. They spend their days wandering to and from the shade to the water hole.

Come fall and winter when they are thinner, sore-footed and depleted of energy, or so they’d have you believe, they hang out close to the feeding grounds. They bellow, dig holes in the ground to waller in, and pick fights with the younger bulls.

By this time they are usually in a pasture by themselves, separated from the cows, and the locker room mentality runs deep. The ‘jock” of the group will fight with anything that looks wrong at him, walks in his “territory” and often for no other reason except he looks like he needs a whippin’. Others will join the fight just because.

All this is well and good if you as a human don’t have to do anything with this testosterone laden herd other than drive by daily and drop some feed to them. Attempts to move them anywhere makes one seriously question the necessity of the critter.

After they refuse to drive except with constant hollering and pushing every single step of the way for the miles you have to go, after the three you are driving to the herd refuse to stay together and you wear your horse out going back and forth- back and forth, and after the big bully bull runs off the young sore-footed bull the seventeenth time, you start using threatening curses like “McDonalds” or “Oscar Mayer!”

Many a cowman has given serious thought to an operation without bulls. Their main option is to get rid of the mama cows and become a “yearlin’” man with the seasonal intake of 45 day weaned calves.

But sometime before Christmas he’ll get a big box of fruit, a nice jacket, or a new stock sorting stick from his “bull man.” And sure enough, he’ll buy a few more new bulls and be back in the bull, cow and calf business before he ever got out of it.

Julie can be reached for comment at jcarter@tularosa.net

© Julie Carter 2004


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