Progressive Training or How the cow learned to jump over the moon
by Bill Gary ( The
following was written sometime in 1997 and appeared in the February 1999 issue of the Working Border
Collie.) Well, call me untrainable, but I find it hard to produce a column with solid, usable, bits and bites of training info. It seems I only feel comfortable when I can put my feet up next to warm stove, rest my hand on a slightly wet and smelly dog (ever notice how the wettest, smelliest dogs are also the friendliest?), and talk a bit about dogs, and training, and farming, and livestock, and politics. Well, Public Radio and the national media have set the standard on broadcast humor and politics, what with all the silliness and much ado about pheromones and big-city hypocrites inside the beltway…so I think I’ll stay away from that one. And the weather around here has kept us from anything more than looking in on the livestock and once in a while hollering, “Anyone dead in there?” for some time now, and since farming ain’t worth the energy it takes to talk about it lately, that just leaves training and dogs. Someone the other day asked about “Progressive Training”, an excellent book by Mr. Vergil Holland, detailing all sorts of information on training stockdogs. They told me they had read it, but still weren’t sure what Mr. Holland meant by “progressive” training…well, that led me into a story about my wife and the cow that learned to jump over the moon. Some few years ago, I came home from a perfectly good job, expecting to sit down to dinner, when my wife Mary casually informed me that she had bought several Scotch Highland cows. I asked her what she planned on doing with them and where she planned on keeping them. The answer was simple, “We’ll just fence off the back pasture.” That sounded doable, so I asked her when we had to pick up the cows. She said delivery was in the deal she had worked out and that two bred heifers and a cow with calf would be there Saturday…this being Thursday and all, I realized we had a bit of work to do over the next couple of days. Several hundred dollars and not a few hours of labor later, we almost had ourselves a pasture – complete with 4 strand electric fence, an electric charger that would burn through a Bradley fighting vehicle, and the start of an alley handling system (these bovines all were in desperate need of shots, hoof trimming, and even castrating for the one young bull calf). I say “almost”, cause one side of the fence wasn’t finished, but had temporary posts and nylon/aluminum temporary wire up. In the meantime, I had a job that required me to be out of town for a while, so I kissed my wife goodbye and left for Washington Courthouse, Ohio, content that all was well, and I was now a Dakota cowboy. While I was gone, my wife made arrangements for the vet to come, feeling confident that with the alley system we had started, she would be able to get the needs of these large ruminants taken care of. Mary headed out to the pasture, and upon trying to get the cows into the alley realized that all we had at this time was a headgate and a short stretch of chute – there was in existence no corral or gates, and that the newly transplanted, big horned, wily old cow had no reason or desire to walk willingly into a trap, and allow herself to manipulated and pawed by a stranger. Those of you who know Mary, know that she was not daunted by such a small roadblock. She looked around for something that would help this situation and focused on the temporary electric that made up the north side of the pasture. She quickly moved this temporary fence down to the alley and stuck the plastic fence posts in the ground, ran the wire, and hooked it up. She then called the oldest cow into the alley with grain and wrapped the wire around the existing electric. Mary told the vet to go ahead and take care of the cow. The vet took one look at the horns on this cow and told Mary that until this cow was firmly in the headgate, he’d prefer to wait in his truck; so he returned to his pickup, slowly shaking his head and murmuring something about city folks moving to the country. Mary, firmly believing that men just generally hide things from women and make things a lot more complicated that they need to be, proceeded to move the cow. Many of you may not know that plastic step-in fence posts are only about 30” high, please take note of this, as this dimension is integral to our story. After a bit of shooing and hollering and chasing, the boss cow took one look at this 30” barrier and launched herself, baby calf and all, over the barrier – looking much like a hunter jumper in full pursuit of the baying hounds. She then trotted back to the other members of the herd, and began chewing unconcernedly on the new grass. Again, my darling wife, being doggedly determined and all (she is the one who taught me that stubborn and doggedly determined are not the same thing – at least when it applies to her and not me), gathered her wits about her and duct taped two plastic posts together, making a barrier that totaled about 4 feet high. She again spread out grain and hollered for the boss cow. This time the cow eyed the new temporary fence balefully, gathered her feet under her, and leapt skyward, easily clearly the new barrier, and establishing a new personal best. About this time, our neighbor Lyle stopped by, saw Mary was having some sort of trouble, and thought he’d help out. Mary tried to explain the entire problem, but old Lyle had spent too many years on tractors with no ear protection...pretty soon, however, he understood the problem and knew what to do about it. Lyle grabbed some boards, nails and a hammer, and proceeded to build a corral right then and there. The vet slipped his baseball cap over his eyes and went to sleep. Pretty soon, old Lyle had a corral built with 5 foot high fences – high enough in his 50 years of cow experience to dissuade any bovine jumper in the Dakotas. He helped Mary move that same old cow into the new corral, and Mary hollered for the vet to wake up and get over there and do what he was billing us for. The cow seemed pretty content until she saw the vet coming over…it seems most animals can genetically recognize a man who has been up to his shoulder inside one of your relatives. That cow swung her head around in a panic and realized she was now facing solid boards instead of temporary wires…but that cow was as stubborn, oops, sorry, as doggedly determined as Mary, and proceeded to coil her entire body up like spring, bunching up like an Olympic hurdler, and, heaven help us all, launched 1800 lbs. of cow and calf straight up and over that 5’ board fence, landing on her feet and, I swear, raising her hands over her head like Mary Lou Retton after a dismount.. This time, however, she didn’t stop until reaching the woods on the other side of the pasture. That is progressive training at its best, my friends. ă Bill Gary 1997
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