My friend Woody always has been forgetful. In fact, it’s why he got fired, but I’ll let him tell the story.
“I
had this real good ranch job working for an absentee owner who lived in
Chicago. He was pleased with my work and I was happy with his money.
Then one day the owner writes me from the windy city saying he’d read an
article that said breeding our heifers to a Jersey bull would eliminate
all our calving problems on the ranch, of which we had none. Either the
heifers lived through the experience or they didn’t. It was no problem
really!
“The owner bought a Jersey
bull and told me to go pick him up. Now, up until this time my vision of
dairy animals was of docile creatures that walked single file into a
milking parlor and gave up their milk willingly in exchange for a hand
full of grain. And when I first saw “Bright Eyes”, as he’d been named by
my boss, the bull certainly fit that description. Bright Eyes was fawn
colored with six black points with a slight dish in his head. He
couldn’t have weighed over 1,000 pounds. The only thing missing was a
locket around his horns. He sure looked peaceful enough until we went to
load him in the Gooseneck®.
“In
the process of loading Bright Eyes he put one horn through the radiator
of the truck and tore the back door off the trailer. We chained the
door closed and all the way home I thought at any minute that bull was
going to explode through the roof of the trailer.
“His
disposition didn’t improve once we got him home either. That sorry
excuse for a bull was a man killer, and simply the sight of a human
being was enough to send him into orbit, pawing and bellering. I can’t
even begin to count the number of times he charged me on my horse,
upending the two of us on several occasions. It got so bad I took to
carrying a four-ten shotgun with me along with shells filled with a
light load of buckshot and powder. When Bright Eyes charged I’d pull the
trigger and knock the dust off his head. It didn’t seem to hurt him
none but it didn’t seem to dampen his enthusiasm for charging me and my
horse either.
“Needless
to say, I wasn’t looking forward to the day when it came time to take
Bright Eyes out of the heifers to put him in the bull pasture...
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