COW WRANGLING

FYI:  First things first...Brisbane update, he is almost back to normal today. Vet said it's just old age and his digestive system not working as fast as it used to. No blockage, just slower movement and a frustrated cat. We'll spare you the gory details but all seems back to normal now and he's catching up on lost sleep. Vet said to just watch his litter usage closely and give him the special laxative as needed.  

So this weekend, among watering and edging and general projects that I blogged about YESTERDAY, I also had to engage in some cattle wrangling...

For weeks, we've been noticing occasional hoof prints in mud, cow patties scattered around but no cow.  I told "J" from 2nd Family and she said they hadn't seen anything either, maybe we had a ghost cow.

Sure enough, captured this on one of the trail cams.  It's a GHOST COW!

OK, so no ghost cow, it was an actual real live cow.

 In our yard.

Mowing the grass.  Hmm, wait, that's not such a bad idea, ha!

But she wasn't there all the time.  A few weeks would go by and then she'd be back.  Here she is one foggy/humid morning. 

There is no sound on these trailcams but this one from the other day cracked us up. It looks like she was stopping, looking right at the camera and expressing her displeasure.  

Saturday I was walking around checking things out, rounded the corner of the house in the backyard and came face to face with her.  After a few seconds of panic (the kind you have when you "unexpectedly" see a large animal and your life flashes before your eyes), I realized it was OK.  She just stood there.  I tried to go up to her but she backed away.  

SO I went down to 2nd Family's house and got "R".  He came up with one of his dogs (Ruben) following behind.  I wished I had recorded it, that dog was so excited to play with the cow.  He would run around, she would put her head down like a bull ready to charge but he was around her in circles. "R" said that the cow belonged next door, he recognized her. Because of the dog running around, she started moving quickly.  We followed along and between us and the dog, she went right back out the way she came in. Ruben was herding her and keeping her on a path and we were there to occasionally encourage her with taps on her rump and cowboy words you'd hear in old Western movies, LOL.  It worked out well and she went exactly back through the same spot in the fence that she came in. "R" and I then fixed the barbed wire, temporarily, and he's going to go over to the neighbor's property and make sure she's in her pasture now and patch up the fences.

I was excited. "Does that make me a cowboy for a day?" I asked 2nd Man.

"Um, NO, that's not how it works", he replied.

Fine. 

She regularly came and went through two fences to get to our property...maybe the grass is indeed greener on the other side...