230201 Animal Humor

‘Animal Humor’

We used to raise several types of animals on the farm, during what Grandma Mickey called “that phase” of my live. Animals are very different than humans and can do some funny things that we liked to call animal humor.

One of the first things animal herdsmen will tell you about cows is to look at them every day! Learn what is normal looking and take immediate action when something’s not right. So I would walk by the barn every morning and every evening when I came home. I would look at the cows and see who was doing what and were they looking like they did the day before. It became my daily routine. The calves were usually still lounging around the barn when I left at six in the morning so there was no problem seeing all of them before I left for the day. The afternoon was quite a different story though. They might be anywhere on the farm, so most days I would have to roam about and find them. Some times they would be aligned so when I saw them and tried to count heads, I’d be one short. They could stay in the same spot without moving for the longest time, forcing me to go through the gate and walk out to where they were and only when I got close would one move and reveal to me that the count was right. I always thought that they thought that they were being funny.

One afternoon I came home and didn’t see them, so I went through the gate and started walking out to find them. I walked out and to the south, but didn’t see any of them. So I went west to the back of the property, looking and seeing nothing. Next I went north to the fence line, still no cows. Now I was beginning to suspect rustlers! I walked the fence line back to its eastern end and started for the gate to go into the house and call the sheriff. Just as I passed the little shed on back of the garage, I caught a slight movement out of the corner of my eye. I thought no way, the little shed was originally made to house a couple of sows and it was walled down the middle so there wasn’t nearly enough room to have the calves in that tiny half shed. I did want to go see what was there though and as I got within five feet of the shed, out they came! They looked like a bunch of clowns at the circus all piling out of one of those tiny cars in the main rink. My concern faded as I saw them roll out of there and I had to laugh at the sight; their animal humor had fooled me again. We were total novices when we bought those first calves. It was late in the day when I got home with them and I asked Joyce to go to the feed store to get the milk substitute. These were bottle calves and we were going to have to bottle-feed them twice a day for a month or two. Joyce went to the local feed store and the counter man looked wide-eyed at her and said: “oh no you didn’t buy them already did you?” She replied: “yes we did.” He said: “well you’re going to lose one or two of them, but here’s what you have to do.” He then explained all the nuances of bottle calf raising to her. She listened to all the advice he had to give and we raised all of them without losing a single calf, which was a remarkable feat. We followed all the rules as stated up until the time for sale arrived. The time for sale came along and I didn’t have a big enough truck to haul the now much larger calves, so I hired a local man to pick them up and deliver them to the sale barn. He asked what kind of calves they were. “Holsteins,” I told him.

“No problem,” he answered. “I can load them by myself, they’re easy to handle.” He showed up at the agreed upon time and he backed up into the barnyard to load them. The calves that should have been easy to load had a different idea than he did. He tried for a half hour to get them into the trailer, but he had no luck. Joyce had been looking out the window, calmly, patiently observing the show. She realized he wasn’t going to get the job done, so she calmly walked out to the barn ad said: “hi.”

“This just isn’t going like I planned,” he said. “These are the darnedest Holsteins I ever seen. They just don’t want to go into the trailer.”

Joyce walked past him, then into the barn, loaded a pan of grain and then walked back out, tossed the pan of grain into the trailer and the calves ran in there in less than 30 seconds. She put the pan back into the barn and walked away, never looking back. The (raised on a farm all his life) farmer learned a new lesson from the novice that afternoon.

The End