12/09/07, 09:12 AM
|
 |
|
|
Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: SE Ohio
Posts: 2,174
|
|
|
The bulls we normally use for clean up (once every five-ten years or so) are coming from other herds the hauler hauls for. He knows the herds and picks one out for us.
With this case....well, the sale barn is less than a mile West of us and we are the first farm those animals hit when they head this direction.
We end up with animals from the sale barn on a fairly regular basis (as in one every couple years or so). There is no way to avoid it really. Had a buck two winters ago that settled two of my does.
We've had bulls in the past, but usually it is cows or calves.
The people at the Sale Barn are good about coming out pretty quickly if it was an animal from there.
With this bull, his owner never claimed him and as far as the people at the sale barn knew no animals had escaped....He had escaped while being unloaded from what I understand.
He wasn't ours to kill. We'd rather not deal with the repurcussions of killing someone else's animal...This assumes, of course, we have guns on the property, which we do not.
It wasn't until about two to three weeks ago that I found out he did actually come from the sale barn. The woman at the Co-Op asked if we still had him around. She had heard an individual saying he had heard the guy who had lost that bull talking. We put signs up and alerted the people who would know.
At any rate, they are bred, he had no STDs (though that was a big concern) and now he will move on.
Once we put those signs up, if he had gone on somewhere else and done damage (we are located in the town limits and have 40+ fencerow neighbors) how much do you want to bet we would have been blamed?
Life is what it is. This is what has happened and this is what will continue to happen as long as there is a sale barn situated that close and people worried about making any claims on animals that get loose from the sale barn.
Our animals are vaccinated. We have too many deer for them not to be. The deer pose more of a threat than these animals do. They are a constant here and we have no control over them since they belong to the King (government).
That heifer took a tranquilizer gun to finally catch her. We tried for over a month to lure her into the Pole Barn with our heifer/dry cow herd. She was nuts! She had escaped while being loaded after being purchased.
Our farm is not set up for crazy beef animals (which are usually what escapes from sale barns). We work Jerseys and Jersey/Norwegian Reds. Most of the perimeter fencing is one or two strand barbed wire. Some areas are high tensil (5 strand), some areas are now being converted to woven wire due to the goats and some areas are multiflora rose...There may be a fence buried in there but it isn't that likely. Cross fencing is one strand electric poly wire...
We use cattle panels tied together with twine to work animals. We are not set up to work beef animals so it is best if we are left to work them ourselves and not have a bunch of strangers in chasing our animals around.
Dad has figured out to get this bull and load him come Tuesday morning. This bull isn't nuts. He's just young.
Last edited by dosthouhavemilk; 12/09/07 at 10:02 AM.
|
) I have only seen a brand once and that was a freeze brand on a horse 
