Cow Chips: The Tenacity of Bulls

The Bulls are one of the more entertaining things to watch when dealing with the cows. Bulls can also be potentially very dangerous. Bulls do not like each other; this is even truer when there are cows around. Like dogs the bulls have to decide who is boss: they do this by fighting. Bulls are tenacious and relentless. Once they get it in their mind to do something there is not much you can do about it. Whenever we have more than one bull at the feed yard there is always situations when you have to put them in the same corral. When you do, they will more than likely fight. Watching a good bull fight is entertaining, but usually results in torn up corrals, mangers, fences and causes a lot of swearing. Having to deal with bulls who want to fight is dangerous; however, sometimes you have to intervene to protect the corrals, cows and even themselves. We have had two bulls gang up on another bull and kill it in the past.

The entertainment value did not go down this year since we had to put a small young bull in the corral with our Panguitch bull. The Panguitch bull is a massive specimen and he out weight this younger bull by I would guess close to a thousand pounds. The smaller bull wanted to fight, the bigger one was game and would not back down. The interesting thing is that the big bull would push the smaller one all over the place; it was obvious which one was the bigger stronger bull. However, this did not stop the smaller bull from tenaciously trying to establish his dominance over the larger bull. Fortunately, they stayed in the corral, and although they tore up the ground in the corral they did not damage any of the corrals or themselves.

For a little while we put two smaller bulls in with the big one. After watching for a while I could see how the smaller bulls could possibly kill or injure the bigger one. One of the smaller bulls would engage the big one from the front, and then the other one would hit the larger bull in the hind quarters and cause him to fall. Sometimes when you put bulls together they will figure out quickly who is bigger and stronger and they will get along with each other. This was not the case this time, we had to separate them. They would stand in their respective corrals on opposite sides of the feed lot and bellow at each other and throw dirt up over their backs with their hooves. This time we were able to avoid having any broken up corrals or injured bulls.