Herd Behavior and Moving Large Bunches of Cattle

The first thing we need to learn in order to handle cattle in a less stressful way is how cattle act in a herd. Unfortunately, this is one of the hardest things to comprehend because most of us have never seen cattle acting as a herd. This is because we create so much stress in moving our cattle from pasture to pasture that we basically blow the herd instinct out of them. We try to do things which we conceive make them easier to move which actually causes a great deal of stress. The very meaning of the word “herd” is a group of animals which remain together, which is what we never see. Fortunately, they still do some things on their own which we can observe to show us the error of our ways. Cattle will follow each other with little effort as long as we start them in the right way, as demonstrated in the following video. These cattle had come in fresh two weeks before this video was taken. They had never been through this gate, or into this pasture before, and the dog "helping" me was just starting out, and deaf on top of it. Even though she makes several mistakes, the steers not only go through the gate, but don't scatter after going through.

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