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bovine suicides

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starvin'dog

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Burnt posted about the loss of a heifer in a hay feeder, pretty common occurance I'm afraid.
What are some of the more bizarre situations you've seen cattle get themselves into?
I was going away for a while and thought I'd swing through the cows before leaving. Got a small working corral with a self catching headgate at the end of a chute. Danged old cow must have been itchy and caught herself up in the headgate I'd left open. She hadn't been there long but was pretty tired. Once in a while you get lucky and 'experience' is pretty cheap. I never leave a headgate open anymore.
 
Once I had a 4 pipes set in cement where they had once supported a windmill. They were about 4 1/2 feet high. I found a 450 lb calf impaled dead center in the calf. Looked like something had lifted him up and dropped him. Didn't take long to get my torch and cut the pipes off.
 
Had a horse strattle a T-Post in a pasture, it was about 3 ft high poked him right in his groin area he only got a scratch but the bronc ride was more than I could handle.
 
Had a 1300 pound steer with a butcher date on a monday laying dead in the feeder pen on Saturday evening. I used to buy 10 or 12 head of feeders steers at the sale barn every spring and feed them out. I got a smoking deal on a cross bred steer cause he had horns. Well the horned steer had stuck a horn in the dead calf in his flank and opened him up like a zipper. :mad: I was at work and didnt know til i fed that evening. The horned steer went in his own pen til the day he went to the processor. I knock horns off the second they get off the trailer nowadays. And antlers keep me from raising my hand at the auction.
 
Quite a few years ago we had a few Scottish Highlander steers we bought from a relative and kept to grow their horns. They were probably 5 years or more when one of them got his head wedged under a tree which had fallen across a then dry creekbed and died.

We were in a run of extremely cold weather and he died with no struggle either from his position, or the cold. It was very difficult to do it, but the head was salvaged and mounted.

We keep an eye out for hazards, knowing that tendencies of good animals to find ways to die or get hopelessly crippled. We would never have imagined that could happen, just seeing a tree that fell across a creek channel that was maybe two to three feed deep and possibly four feet wide.

mrj
 
nice Hereford bull we bought at a fall sale the next spring jumped a 6 rail pole fence catching one hind leg to hang himself , found him dead. not one calf out of him :mad:
 
I could begin to count the cattle that i have seen dead stuck between two trees make me wonder what they were thinking. The best i have ever seen is we had an old braham angus cross that hated to be around people well one day we were gathering cows off some mountian ground that one side was a hundred plus cliff well she decided that she was not going off that mountian and took off running as hard as she could and jumped off the cliff. I dont think anyone even shed a tear that day :)
 
We had a set of twins last year that I resussinated one back to life and finely got him where both were nursing the cow. Had them in a huge barn by themselves and the mamma cow laid on one of the twins. Went out the next morning to check on them and turn them out and the one twin was flatter than a pancake.... :(
 
Had a 5 year old cow get into a small garden shed in an old yard once. The door didn't latch, but she must have kept circling the wrong way and swinging the door shut. And a window big enough to drive a tank through. This was in mid winter. Didn't find her til the next July. We were wondering where she had disappeared to. Wasn't a heartbreaking loss, she was a fence crawler and prolapser that we were just keeping to get the calf out of...
 
This still tops the list for me :roll:

Winter342-1.jpg
 
Soapweed had a picture of a cow impaled on a steel post, but that calf under that rock is the biggest argument against karma I have ever seen...
 
Haytrucker said:
Soapweed had a picture of a cow impaled on a steel post, but that calf under that rock is the biggest argument against karma I have ever seen...
Click to expand...

This is a neighbor's cow that I saw while driving down the highway. It was such a unique death, that I had to drive over to capture the moment
with the camera. The cow had evidently jumped up on another cow, and came down on top of an old well pipe. It would be a bad way to die.
Impaleduponapieceofprotrudingpipe.jpg

Poor old cow
Deaderthanadoornail.jpg

Deader than a doornail
Deadcow.jpg

She's a goner. Her troubles are over.

My picture is bizarre, but I think Wyoming Rancher has the best one. The calf's mother should sue the ranch because it didn't have any
"Beware of Falling Rock" signs in place. :wink:
 
couple of those are crazy - shortgrass, soap. by the one wyo rancher posted has to take the cake. do you wonder if that calf was curled up trying to catch heat off the rock and mamma tipped if over on it?

the freakiest one i heard of. some real close friends in the judiths had 7 of their 12 bulls zapped along a five wire fence that were trailing along it headed for shelter in a lightning storm. laid em all over right in a row.
 
Sent some weaned heifer calves to a guy near the Niobrara river to feed during the winter for us in 2002. He needed more of a water supply in their lot so he dug a water line through it one afternoon and laid water line in the trench. Got finished filling the trench up right at dark, and filled just a tick outside the pen. During the night those heifers were walking around the outside of the pen, and the sand started caving off into the next pen where he hadn't connected and covered the line yet, Sometime before morning 7 of them headed down into the trench, and once in there moved enough to cause the sand to cave in on top of them and it smothered all of them. He told me that was the worst phone call he had ever had to make in his life, and I told him that it was a wreck, but that I could think of alot of phone calls that would be much harder to make. Typical of weaned calves, if you would have tried to drive them in that ditch, there wouldn't be enough cowboys and cowdogs in the state to do it.
 
Had a call one time for a kindly older woman that we rented river bottom pasture from. She said she could hear a cow bawling for her calf. I found a 500 pound steer calf with his head wedged in a hollow tree that had and inverted V notch starting at ground level. He was alive but had all the hair worn off behind the ears. All he had to do was lower his head and back out but just kept pulling back. I suppose at some point he would of gotten tired enough to lay down. I put a rope on his hind legs and jerked him down. Then I had the problem of getting the rope off. Fortunately he was wore out enough it wasn't much of a problem.
 
Hereford76 said:
couple of those are crazy - shortgrass, soap. by the one wyo rancher posted has to take the cake. do you wonder if that calf was curled up trying to catch heat off the rock and mamma tipped if over on it?

the freakiest one i heard of. some real close friends in the judiths had 7 of their 12 bulls zapped along a five wire fence that were trailing along it headed for shelter in a lightning storm. laid em all over right in a row.
Click to expand...

Your guess is as good as mine. The boulder had probably only been there thousands of years :? . The boulder had fractured in half, and part of it rolled down onto the unsuspecting little victim. It's always something!
 
We started smelling something dead when in SW Montana so we started
looking horseback. We found what it was. Lightening had hit a pine tree on the creek and killed 4 cows and 3 calves. They weren't pairs. :cry:

A purebred producer that lives near here, the day of his bull sale,
he came home to find 7 dead registered cows that were eating out of a hay feeder that was struck by lightening.

My deceased father-ini-law always said the only way you weren't going
to lose them, was to not have them!
 

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