May 1, 2020 3 min read

Our bottle-fed calves gave me yet another run for my money this weekend.

Oh, didn’t I share this before?

Last week one evening, one of them got out and took off across the hillside. I had to sneak up on him, tackle him and hold him down while UTV was brought to me to bring him back. It was no big deal, I guess, just 120 pounds of fear and fury on four hooves kicking and fighting for freedom.

I managed to survive – barely.

In part because of that event, we decided it was time for both calves to get out of their pen and out in the yard for a while, so we put halters on them to begin the process of training them to accept a lead rope.

Calves look so adorable in their halters, a mixture of grown up and yet so little. First, we clip the halter to a lead rope that is tied off to a gate or a post and let them pull against it until they understand that they can’t go farther than the length of the cord. It takes a varying amount of time for different calves, but these two were quick learners. In no time, they accepted the rope and the different type of confinement.

Next, we tied the ropes to the UTV and very slowly crept toward the yard. This encouraged them to walk on the rope, while preventing injury to any person who could be pulled around by an errant calf.

When our little girl calf decided she had walked far enough and refused to go one step farther, we loaded her into the front of the UTV and let her hitch a ride. The boy calf trotted so fast we had to slow him down to prevent his rope from wrapping around the axle and choking him.

The calves were staked out in the yard where the sun could beat down upon them, but they could reach some shade as well. We bottle fed them there and brought them grain and water. They nibbled on the grass and it seemed such a quaint picture.

But reality is rarely a Norman Rockwell painting, and the calves began to cry. Each time they could see one of us, they began bawling and wouldn’t stop. It began grating on us, so we decided to put them into the pasture with our young heifers instead. The idea was that they would become part of that herd and they could learn proper cow behavior from them. And it may still work at some point, but they are small enough that they slipped under the fence and got out.

Numerous times.

We must have put them back in the pasture a half dozen times in under an hour. When we finally peeked out at them and saw them walking directly back to the pen they had just been freed from, we gave up for the week, and locked them back inside.

We’ll try again next weekend, I imagine. And maybe the weekend after that. Eventually, they will realize the pasture is a more enjoyable environment than the pen in the barn.

Or, if they don’t, at least they will eventually be too big to escape.