Herd Behavior and Moving Large Bunches of Cattle - Part 3

The whole secret to letting (not forcing) your cattle act as a herd is to use cattle instinct to your advantage rather than against you. If you get your motion going and keep it going from the back, you are working against yourself and not keeping the cattle as stress free as possible. Think about it for a second. Most of the time you are moving your cattle to fresh feed, so why should that be stressful to them? It should not, in fact your cattle (if they are being handled in a way they are relaxed in) should want to move for you. Keep in mind you will have to work at this and it will take several moves before they start moving for you with little or no effort. To keep them relaxed:

1. Do not push them from the back
2. Let a lead establish itself (and remember a lead is 1 or 2 head in the front, NOT 15 or 20 head abreast !!!)
3. Keep them loose – They will want to keep several feet to several yards between them while moving
4. Keep your motion going from the front to back.
5. If you have cattle wandering off in the wrong direction, try to approach them from the front. They will go by you and try to catch up to the other cattle (often at a trot or lope) without you having to “push” them.
6. Do not turn the cattle from back to front by riding between them and the fence. This only turns the back of the herd first, which slows the forward motion of the herd and ususally begins other problems. Turn the lead first and the rest of the herd will turn as they  approach you.

          The first couple of times you may have to ride hard to get them lined out as it is not established in them to follow one another (as we have spent their entire lives keeping them from doing so). Once they begin figuring it out you may have to go at a trot just to keep up with them and get them turned into the right gate. In the following video I picked these steers up in a 640 acre stubble field. They had been there for approximately three weeks, and all but five head were together (and those five head were only about 200 yards away). I had driven the cattle out the first gate and across a field to the fence along a county road. This video will show me turn the cattle off the road and leave as 723 steers go through the gate with no one and noting to turn them. This was the second gate of a six gate, three mile move I made with these steers and no help.

          These methods work especially well with pairs if you want to keep them paired throughout the move. A few years ago I was working on a large registered outfit. We were always moving pairs in groups of 350 or more. For some reason these guys were always wadding them from the back. Moves which should have taken a few hours would turn into a long day (or several days). One move was dreaded because the cattle would ball up at the bottom of a mountain and turn the wrong way and would not be paired. The funny thing about this was although there was a 10-foot gate right in the road they were trailed down, they wanted to turn the cattle left to take them through a 30-foot gate followed by another turn to the right. One day we gathered that pasture and I talked one of the guys at the bottom of the pasture into opening that narrow gate. I had a couple of interns with me who allowed the cattle to string out, and I just stayed at the front until about 50 yards from the gate, and let them go. The cattle ran through the gate with calves at side, through three more gates and into the trap where we wanted them. A few calves missed the gate, bawled and their mothers came back for them. Needless to say the guy who had argued about them not going through the gate thought it was “lucky” and had nothing to do with letting them string out.

          I want to mention one other thing that causes a lot of stress here. It is something nearly everyone does from time to time to make things easier, but that causes a lot of stress. That is farmering down and leading your cattle with a feed wagon.  Cattle have their own pecking order. When you stop in the middle of a pasture with a load of feed the same cattle are there at the truck every day and the same cattle are always out on the fringes. Alphas first on feed and the lower down the pecking order, the longer they have to wait to get on feed. When you start moving cattle with feed, they will line up in the same way. The cattle next to the load will be trying to nibble as they go. The ones on the back are waiting to get to feed. It would be like going to a restaurant and fighting with a bunch of NFL linebackers to see who gets to eat first (and adding to the frustration by having your prime rib moving away from you just fast enough that you can’t get to it) After awhile you lose interest and go to some fast food joint.

          This scenario is even more stressful if you are moving pairs.  The calves will automatically drop to the back rather than fight for feed with the cows. They lose track of their mothers, want to go back to where they came from and the wreck is on. Just let them move out, keep your motion going from front to back with the cattle going past you and you will never have problems moving your pairs, no matter how young they are. With yearling cattle,  this method will instill the instinct for the cattle to follow one another.  Once the cattle get the idea  one person can move some pretty  large groups of cattle. I regularly move from 300 to more than 700 head of steers  with only a deaf dog for help and few problems (Anyone who claims to never have a problem probably never does anything.)

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