The time has finally come to bring my cow home. This may seem weird to most people, but Rosie is almost like a dog to me. A pet that gives something useful in return.
We had her and her son at another farm. The steer was booked into the butcher, but he was so busy we had to wait a couple of months. The farmer didn't want us to take Rosie home until the steer was going too. There had been some trouble with him escaping (the fences here would never keep him in) and they thought he might go a bit crazy if he was left alone.
The day came when the butcher gave us a call and told us he was ready, finally. We went with a large hire trailer, only to find the farmer wasn't going to be home to help us catch them, and that we couldn't drive in the paddock. The trailer, even though they told us it had a ramp, it was nowhere near big enough for cows to walk up.
I walked into the paddock and found them, they followed me back to the trailer, but there was no way they were getting on. After trying for about an hour to get them to step up onto the trailer, we packed it in and went to get help.
Even with the help we couldn't get them back to the trailer, let alone get the stupid things on. While i was down the bottom of the paddock, yes all down hill one way and up hill the other, I noticed a small cattle yard with a ramp. It was next to a house so I went back to the cars and we found our way to the house and asked the farmer if we could use his yards to catch and load the cows.
Even better, he offered to round them up for us and we could come back tomorrow and load them on the trailer. Fantastic!! It turned out they were in his paddock, they had escaped from where they were supposed to be a month back, and he had no idea who they belonged to, and was happy to help get rid of them.
The next day, driving down their driveway, the trailer popped off the car and went under the back of the car. It got stuck there and we were heading downhill. We tried to go to the bottom of the hill to get it out from under the car, but that didn't work, it just went further under and ripped the top of the trailer brakes off and bent the lever. We ended up putting rocks under the wheels to keep the trailer still and drove the car forward a bit then we were able to get the trailer back on the car.
When we got to the house we found that the farmer had been able to just walk the cows into the yard, had built us a small ramp to the height of the trailer and all that a few minutes after we had left the day before.
They both just walked onto the trailer, easy as that!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment