Call Your Bluff

Mar 21

Close-up of a brown calf with white markings, facing the camera in a barn. Soft focus background creates a warm, serene mood.

A woman in glasses and a red top smiles in a green field. Text highlights her role as a content creator and coach, with a contact link.

My dad had a cow once that was a bit high-headed. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how carefully you cull your herd, a crazy one slips past you. The trick is that once you realize they’re unmanageable you haul them to the sale. Well, this one didn’t show her crazy until she had a calf and Dad didn’t want to risk the calf’s health by hauling them. So Old High Head was sticking around for a bit.

The pasture she was in had a loading chute and ground-loading alleyway built into the fence line. It was a handy feature in most cases.

A black-and-white image of a wooden cattle chute with metal bars in a rural setting, surrounded by grass and trees. No text visible.

Dad backed up his feeding pickup, which was equipped with a DewEze bale bed, to block the end of the alleyway and drove OHH and her calf up so he could give it its calfhood vaccines. The calf was securely up on the bed of the DewEze when Dad uttered that fatal phrase, “She’s all bluff. She won’t jump up here.” Well, she did.

Thankfully, Dad and the calf bailed off the side before the cow made her leap. The calf got its vaccines and eventually, they both left our place for greener pastures.

A brown calf with a white marking rests on green grass, looking calmly at the camera. The background features blurred greenery.

Animal agriculture runs in my family and one of our relatives runs a rodeo stock contracting company.

One year a high school rodeo association asked him to bring stock for their local event. He wasn’t a fan of this type of event as they tended to last for hours and sometimes the parents were harder to deal with than a pen of Mexican fighting bulls. So he padded his quote considerably in hopes that they wouldn’t be able to afford him. The joke was on him. They happily accepted it and suddenly he was the stock contractor for a high school rodeo.

In life, those kind of things just happen. Sometimes you look back at it and laugh and other times you wonder how you moved fast enough.