Invasion of the Bulls

There is a saying - Good fences make good neighbours - this is more true in a rural setting.  There is nothing worse than having the neighbours livestock turn up in your paddocks.  There can be any number of reasons why this can be a problem.  The fenceline is the responsibility of both sides, but I’m told that when you have stock in a paddock, it’s up to you to ensure that they stay there.  So if they end up at the neighbours, you’re the one who has to sort it out and pay for any damage.

This happened to us just as I got a bull in for my two heifers.  I’d been thinking and talking about it.  My Dad had been out and seen my girls, but he didn’t think they were ready for it.  He was raised on a dairy farm that ran Jersey cows though and they’re about twice the size of the average dexter.  I heard all sorts of advice about the weight a heifer is supposed to be before she’s ready, but again, that was advice for larger breeds - I couldn’t see my girls ever reaching 280kg.  They let me know by their behaviour.

You see, Patsy and Eddie started jumping fences.  Fortunately, Eddie jumped the fence to the wonderful neighbours and ran around in a paddock with his heifers for a week.  Patsy, after bellowing angrily at her sister for 3 days, decided she wasn’t going to be outdone and jumped the fence in the other direction.  Toward all the ugly big jersey bulls.  We got them both contained fairly quickly into deer-fenced paddocks.  Much to their disgust.

I heard about this bull from a lady I was buying bobby calves from.  The breeder who owns the bull has something like 9 pedigree dexter bulls that she is happy to loan out for free, you just organise the transport yourself and you pick him up from whoever has him currently.  She likes him to stay with each person for 7 weeks, which gives him at least 2 attempts to do his job with your ladies.

The day I got him, he was a bit stroppy after being in the horse float for an hour and a half, so I kept him next to but separate from my girls for a couple of hours.  But within seconds of being in the same paddock, he was on one of them and had done the job right in front of me (and my then 6 year old daughter).

The trouble came two weeks later.  I found the neighbours bulls had broken through and were in our big paddock.  I hastily ran an electric fence across to stop them from coming up to the house and out on the road, before ringing the neighbour.  The neighbour leases his land to another neighbour who in turn leases it to a local stock agent.  He was going to ring the stock agent and get it sorted for me.  Two days later, I couldn’t see any of the bulls, so I made the assumption that they’d gone back and it had been taken care of.  Turns out they’d gone down our gully and cleaned up all the fallen plums.

© Copyright Andy F and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence

Just two or three days later, I got up to hear the most dreadful racket coming from my back paddock.  I was used to hearing the bulls bellow at each other, just not from that direction.  When I looked, I found that they were in my paddocks, lined up against the fence to the paddock where my girls were entertaining their guest.  Well, they were supposed to be entertaining their guest.  Campbell was too busy bellowing at the line up and they were bellowing back.  By this time, the bulls had been changed from the big ugly jersey brutes that had been there, now there was a mix of young bulls. I could identify herefords and fresians, but there were also some mostly black with the odd white patch that I’m guessing were crossbreeds of some sort.

I thought my lot were safe, but rang the neighbour again and told him what was going on.  He was on holiday in the Coromandel so too far removed to do much, but promised to ring the neighbour he leased the land to and get it sorted.  Great.  Two hours later, I was greeting a visitor that Hubby was also home from work to see and we were looking at the bulls lined up against the fence when one managed to lift the gate separating them off it’s hinges and suddenly my girls and borrowed bull were running loose with 6 other bulls.

Hubby started into the paddock saying “We’ve got to separate them.”  I looked at the bulls jumping on each other and one who jumped on one of my girls, not that she stood still for him.  “I’m not going into a paddock with 7 randy bulls,” I told him, “it’s just not safe.”  So we had no choice but to leave them and hope for the best.

After another day or so, they’d all settled down and it was in the end very easy to separate my girls and Campbell our borrowed bull.  I put nails through the gate gudgeons and bent them around to prevent the gate from being lifted off again.

A month came and went and the bulls weren’t interested in my girls at all, so I knew they’d both conceived, but I still had six bulls roaming around my big paddock.  To be honest, I wasn’t too worried.  The big paddock is inadequately fenced so I hadn’t put my cattle into it, but had grass that was reaching waist height in it.  We had a very wet spring and summer so it wasn’t a fire risk, but it just kept growing and seemed like a great waste of feed.  Having the bulls roaming took a lot of the grass down.

Then I got a call from the neighbour on the other side.  “You got some fresian bulls at the moment?” I explained the situation to him and his whole manner changed.  They’d broken through to his place and he was worried about his heifers that he didn’t want in calf.  He was going to tell me off, but since they weren’t mine and had wandered through from further over, that wasn’t my responsibility.

© Copyright Colin Grice and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

It took a couple of months before they were gone.  Even then, I noticed one that had dodged the round up.  We managed to drive him through the hole in the floodgate and patched up the hole after him.

By this stage, I’d gotten a couple of bobby calves - one heifer and one steer.  I was warned that she could start cycling at four months of age and one of those bulls would kill her if he tried to mount her.  Not to mention that she’d be far too small to have a calf.

The floodgates are a mess again.  It only takes one storm to raise the level and speed of the stream to wash away all sorts of things, so it’s time to go and make sure that we’re not going to have a repeat.  We have a few ideas of how we may make them a bit more secure, we’ll just have to see if it all works.