Longhorn Problems

[Karenrbw]

My FIL has 13 Longhorn cows that he has had for about a year and a half. They are in a 70 acre pasture with timber, creek, pond, round bales, feed troughs, etc. They have free choice prairie grass hay and are grained every other day. The cows calved this spring and the calves were sold a month or so ago. All the cows were rebred this fall and the bull has gone back home. No problems with these ladies all this time......until last week. When feeding, one cow was missing. She is usually the first up when we honk the horn to feed. An examination of pasture revealed fence intact and large hole in ice of pond. Conclusion ..... High Horns fell through the ice and drowned. Four days later, neighbor calls and says "Come get your cow, she's been here since the weekend." We finally get High Horns back into the pasture. Immediately, two other cow charger her, get her down and basically chase her right back over the fence. Found here yesterday and got her penned up by herself. She did not want to go in as she was afraid of getting beat on again. The other cows are not happy about her being back. Hindsight reveals that MIL saw 12 cows chasing one over the hill several times last week.
Why have they decided to turn on High Horns and make her life miserable? Anything we can do? Hate to take her to the sale, but it may come down to that if she can't stay in with the rest of the girls.

[wr]

Something has caused the usual social order of the herd to change. Did they bring in any new cows, any chance that the cow is ill or old enough to have had a hormonal change or have they just weaned calves? Often if you bring in a new cow that is agressive enough to overtake your top cows, she can cause problems for a while with the lower ranking cows. Longhorns typically have a very strong social order and you might encourage them to watch the social order and see if the can notice anything unusual.

[warrior]

Definitely a pecking order thing. Herd/pack/flock animals (cows, horses, dogs, chickens) all have a definite pecking order and I would imagine that longhorns being more recent to the wild herd would have a stronger herding/pecking order type relationship. It is all the survival of the fittest type thing. A dominant animal must maintain that dominance through sheer force or a combination of force and bluff. Once that dominance is lost then they are fair game to all members of the herd until they either re-establish their position at a lower level or more often are driven completely out of the herd. Nature has very little tolerance for weakness.
You don't tell us anything about high horns. If I had to guess I would say that she is an older female that once was the dominant female or had challenged the dominant and lost badly. She could also be a younger animal that was bad to challenge every female ahead of her in the pecking order and lacked the strength to enforce her will. (they got tired of the troublemaker LOL). She can be added back to the herd but it would take some severe intervention on your part. You would have to monitor the herd daily (almost around the clock) and beat back any assaults on high horns as well as make sure she can be contained in the pasture. This may take weeks to take the pressure off of her. You could build a smaller paddock within the pasture just for her and then try to add a cow at a time to that paddock (starting with the least aggressive to high horns) in an attempt to restructure the the pecking order. If she could then bond with three or more cows she might be able to rejoin the herd though you would then have a period of pushing and shoving until they get things settled down. Personally I think the smaller paddock is the better of the options in a 70 acre pasture.

[Whip Hussmann]

Had some Longhorns almost kill a deer once . The deer couldn't jump back out.I never seen them chase one of their own though.