Nov 20, 2011

Roping a yearling calf in the barnyard

If you have ever done anything dumb  then you can relate to the story I have to tell here. I grew up on a farm and farm boys are supposed to be able to do all these things with animals like break horses and rope calves and throw them down on their side and tie their feet and well you know all those things that cowboys do sometime.

Well I was a cowboy. I had cowboy boots and cowboy shirts and even a cowboy hat. I had even roped things standing still such as posts and tree stumps. I cut, raked, baled and hauled hay sometimes completely by myself. I irrigated the fields and rode a horse down to the pasture to bring the cows into the barn where I would there milk them by hand. I would drink milk that had not been pasteurized nor homogenized. In fact there was a usual thing that happened at least once a week and usually every day where the cows would let go of their bowls while I was milking and specs of green stuff would splash into the bucket. I would pour all the milk into a cream separator and the only thing between it and the milk going into the fridge was a piece of specially made paper that would strain most of the stuff out of the milk. I loved eating cereal with straight thick cream from off the top of the bottles and having butter made from the rest of it for spreading on our bread. Then there was the buttermilk we made and well I didn’t drink much of it cause I didn’t like it but I did eat the homemade cottage cheese on lettuce with miracle whip on top of that. Yes I was truly a cowboy that did everything that cowboys did except smoke and drink, that was never a temptation. I had also killed and skinned our own beef with my father and walked past the stinky guts that rotted outside of the slaughter house. I even went rabbit hunting and shot at coyotes (never hit any that I know of) except for the rabbits I did hit plenty of them. I cleaned out the barn and killed chickens and turkeys for meat. Gathered and washed eggs and fed the chickens. Learned how to do animal sounds that would get any mother animal wondering if I had her offspring. Yes I was a cowboy or was I a farm boy.  Well in a ploy to be a real cowboy I took the rope out into the barn yard one afternoon before doing chores and roped one of the yearling calves. No I didn’t succeed the first second or even third time. It was a lot harder than I had always thought it would be for me. However I did finally succeed and then suddenly realized I had made a huge mistake. The calf was bigger than I had figured and the power in it’s legs much stronger than I could have imagined. I finally got it to go on one side of a post for the shed and then was able to finally get it tied down. It took me a lot longer to finally get the rope off of it’s neck but I did finally manage to accomplish it. I hadn’t ever thought about the fact that as a calf backs up the rope only gets tighter around it’s neck. Needless to say I never tried to be a cowboy again by roping another calf.