Last time I was in Yellowstone a crazy lady tried to scare off a buffalo on one of the walkways at Old Faithful. I thought it was going to charge, but didnāt. I have a book about deaths in National Parks and most are urbanites, who donāt know how to behave in uncontrolled environments like the flip flop wearers at the Grand Canyonās North Rim. They actually have Coroner Rangers in some parks including Grand Canton!
Way back in college we used to take drives before dinner to ‘work up’ an appetite. The distance from the passenger seat to the barbed wire fence is usually 10′-12′, right?
Driving down a country road, just jabbering and whatnot, I suddenly yelled STOPPPP!! Back up. He backed up and stopped. There was a bison/buffalo (assault cow) with its head hanging over the fence staring at us. Their head are absolutely huge! 4 ft top to bottom and at least 3′ across! Massive animals for sure.
Even a common cow can kill you deader than a door nail. However; most cows choose not to kill humans. They’ve been domesticated and they have been conditioned to expect humans to feed them. Bulls tend to be more cantankerous because they have testicles. However; the meanest bovine I ever met was a Holstein cow.
It just amazes me that people would provide a buffalo. I speak as someone who was arrested at the Kennedy Space center for molesting the alligators.
“However; most cows choose not to kill humans. Theyāve been domesticated and they have been conditioned to expect humans to feed them.”
I know a cattle rancher that has off-and-on problems with overly-aggressive cattle, and he deals with it by making sure they go to the slaughterhouse *first*… š
My cow has horns and she knows how to use them when she gets sassy.
I swear she could nail a fly on the panel; she knows where the tips are.
My most aggressive critter was a turkey tom who went to freezer camp last week.
Tom got aggressive with my boy when he was little. Tom did fine in the oven.
Elmer.
Orneriest domestic bovine I’ve ever had to deal with was a little Jersy bull. mean and quick. Little bull was much more agile than the Holstein cows I grew up milking.
I’ve worked with rodeo livestock, half wild ranch animals, and other classes of livestock.
It’s said by people I’ve known who hunted Africa that right behind hippo’s comes the cape buffalo for being deadly/dangerous. From what I’ve read, the Gaur of India have been known to kill tigers.
Half a ton or more of angry bovine is nothing to under estimate.
My Godfather had a hobby ranch in East Texas where he bred and kept a small herd of Santa Getrudis cattle (breed developed on the King Ranch in the early 1900’s; basically a cross of Shorthorn (5/8) and Brahman (3/8)).
For a number of years, he had a purebred Brahman bull (herd had gotten too “Shorthorn”) that was bad-tempered personified. Woe betide you if you tried to take a shortcut on foot across one of the pastures where he was — he’d see and come after you on a dead run from a quarter mile away, and trying to deworm / medicate him was a bitch even for experienced cowhands.
I currently have a Black Angus bull and he’s very docile and even-tempered, but what you have to watch out for is that unlike most of the cows and the steers, he has no fear of humans at all. My beef cattle aren’t handled much and cows and steers will generally back down if you move toward them aggressively, wave a rope or stick at them or whatnot, as long as they don’t think they’re defending a calf (and even then, usually). Bulls will call your bluff, so you have to have a plan — it’s better to lure and distract than confront.
Friendly, bottle-raised or regularly-handled cattle, like dairy cattle, are actually responsible for the most injuries and deaths, because people encounter them in close quarters and let their guard down. A cow or steer can seriously injure you just because it’s playful or frisky, or in a moment of annoyance.
A friend of mine (retired back-country ranger at Yellowstone) has hours of tales regarding Tourons visiting National Parks.
Speaking of Disney influence, she related that multiple visitors over the years asked “What time do you turn the animals on?” Clearly they thought the wildlife was animatronic and programmed by a computer.
78-80 I worked at IBP Emporia Ks. Humans did the work, recently I seen a video of the new processing plants a d most all the jobs I did are now done with a robot machine. It made me sick, makes me sick to think about it.
Just something about a machine killing and cutting up a creature ain’t right.
.
Two hobo’s were walking down the railroad tracks. They was hungry and came upon a ran over possum
One said its nasty but I’m hungry and started eating. The other hobo said he was going to wait for a hot meal.
The other hobo said ” Good luck with that.”
They walked about a half hour and all of a sudden the possum eating hobo started puking.
The other hobo said , ” See, I told you I’d get a hot meal.”
My hunting buddy drew a bison permit a few years ago for Gardiner, Montana. January 5th: 0 F, light “breeze” blowing the snow and ice crystals into a ground fog, 1500 hrs and he sights the perfect bull way up an arroyo. We run up the arroyo, two shots and the bull is on the ground…then the work began. There were three of us. J and his nephew did most of the butchering whilst I hauled the meat (on a toboggan over about 24″ of snow) down to the road where the truck and trailer were. We started the carcass at 1600 hrs and finished up around 2030. As big as bison are alive…they are twice as big when they are 2,000 pounds of meat, bones and guts laying there. The animal’s trachea was the size of a diesel truck exhaust pipe. The gut pile was probably 350 pounds.
J got a really nice robe and cape mount from his bison.
Nephew and I received a decent amount of meat for our help.
PS: we had a total of five good skinning knives that I kept in rotation to J and nephew. Bison is hard on a blade, as they dulled one, I would give them a fresh knife and take the dulled one to sharpen. Each knife was sharpened at least twice. The people who claim that they “skinned a buffalo with Grandpa’s Uncle Henry folder” are full of crap.
I give common critters a wide berth, and critters bigger then me an even wider berth. Has anyone ever seen a rabid possum suddenly go wild? It’s best to have a loaded high capacity automobile ready, or at least a 12 guage shotgun.
BTW,
It’s illegal to descent a skunk in Washington State because they are an asymptomatic carrier of rabies..
Iām always rooting for the wildlife at Yellowstone cause the tourist are ignorant. It only proves that high capacity assault cows are needed because of the sheer number of stupid people.
I work with a couple fairly large shorthorn oxen nearly every day. These are about a year and a half old and weigh in at about 12 to 15 hundred pounds now and will likely mature to around 2000 pounds in 6 to 8 months. My Belgian mares are around 1500 pounds and the 2 geldings will go over a ton each. While I don’t fear any of these animals, I do have a healthy respect for their size and strength. Any of them could injure or kill a frail human without much effort.
These are hand raised, domestic animals. Wild animals will react to a perceived threat by either flight or fight.
After working with horses, I have a lot of respect for them. If they wanted to do us harm they could easily. But they would lose their meal ticket, shelter, health care, etc.
Horses are at least as smart as dogs and are smart enough to get up to mischief just to prove they can.
A Bull will close his eyes before he hits, a cow wont.
Just about had my guts squashed out when I jumped behind the gate of a charging Charollies( did I spell that right, Sharlay.)
If you dont think a cow can fck you up grab its calf out in a pasture.
Woolarock Museum has a drive through animal looky, seen a Bull Buffalo(Bison) got out of the car and started walking towards it, ” Come here Ole Dick, come here, come here” I figured he was probably a pet being around the care takers and what not. Told a park manager about it and he said dont do that, we had that bull charge and damage a car last week.
I’ve not worked Bison but they move a whole lot faster then cattle, I bet they’d be the shits if they got pissed.
I think to get close to a buffalo you got to put on a wolf skin and crawl up to it with a rock tied on a stick.
Those pre whiteman Native Americans had to be some badass humans yup yup.
I think if I had a time machine I’d go back about 10,000 years, that was freedom. We really haven’t got freedom in today’s world, today freedom cost money.
Yep,10,000 years.
Clovis Point spears were the “Assault Weapon” of that prehistoric era.
One spear, multiple points easily “reloaded” like a semi-automatic rifle.
Led to the extinction of the Western Hemisphere’s “unarmed” original horses.
If you dont think a cow can fck you up grab its calf out in a pasture.
I do that a bunch of times every year. I rope and castrate the bull calves in a corral with their moms standing right next to me. Two of us holding the calf down, one of us cutting.
Saw a newborn out in the pasture this spring and when they’re that young they’ll let you come up and touch them*, so my daughter and I caught him and banded him right out there in the pasture, again with the mom standing right there and the rest of the herd looking on.
Weirdly, they’ll charge a coyote or dog that comes near their calf, but not us humans.
*It would be great if we could do that every time, but they’re on open pasture and woods and they tend to hide their calves away for the first couple days, so sometimes you don’t even know they’re born until they’re a day or two older and more wary.
I’ve had the mom just stand there and watch too, and sometimes not.
I was thinking why, might have had something to do with I was new to the herd and the ones that charged were first time calf bearers?
Charolais.
My neighbor had a charolais bull of about 2000lbs who busted into my pasture one time. I chased him back by holding a 3’x6′ rectangle of hot tub cover over my head. At one point he jumped about 4′ straight up and kicked his rear legs out. His musculature was impressive.
Another time one of my young bulls got into that big white boy’s pasture and would not stop pestering him. Eventually I just had to run up and start shoving and yelling to separate them and get my bull back home. The charolais looked at me as if the say “Thanks.”
Good times.
Touron in Yellowstone was watching a large herd of Elk, there was a Park Ranger monitoring the crowd when the touron approached him and wanted to know where the corrals were that they herded the Elk into at night!
Last time I was in Yellowstone a crazy lady tried to scare off a buffalo on one of the walkways at Old Faithful. I thought it was going to charge, but didnāt. I have a book about deaths in National Parks and most are urbanites, who donāt know how to behave in uncontrolled environments like the flip flop wearers at the Grand Canyonās North Rim. They actually have Coroner Rangers in some parks including Grand Canton!
Way back in college we used to take drives before dinner to ‘work up’ an appetite. The distance from the passenger seat to the barbed wire fence is usually 10′-12′, right?
Driving down a country road, just jabbering and whatnot, I suddenly yelled STOPPPP!! Back up. He backed up and stopped. There was a bison/buffalo (assault cow) with its head hanging over the fence staring at us. Their head are absolutely huge! 4 ft top to bottom and at least 3′ across! Massive animals for sure.
Bison.
There are no buffalo in North America.
*except imported, like in zoos.
I blame Disney. Generations of Americans that don’t have a clue as to what the natural world is all about.
Even a common cow can kill you deader than a door nail. However; most cows choose not to kill humans. They’ve been domesticated and they have been conditioned to expect humans to feed them. Bulls tend to be more cantankerous because they have testicles. However; the meanest bovine I ever met was a Holstein cow.
It just amazes me that people would provide a buffalo. I speak as someone who was arrested at the Kennedy Space center for molesting the alligators.
“However; most cows choose not to kill humans. Theyāve been domesticated and they have been conditioned to expect humans to feed them.”
I know a cattle rancher that has off-and-on problems with overly-aggressive cattle, and he deals with it by making sure they go to the slaughterhouse *first*… š
My cow has horns and she knows how to use them when she gets sassy.
I swear she could nail a fly on the panel; she knows where the tips are.
My most aggressive critter was a turkey tom who went to freezer camp last week.
Tom got aggressive with my boy when he was little. Tom did fine in the oven.
Elmer.
Orneriest domestic bovine I’ve ever had to deal with was a little Jersy bull. mean and quick. Little bull was much more agile than the Holstein cows I grew up milking.
I’ve worked with rodeo livestock, half wild ranch animals, and other classes of livestock.
It’s said by people I’ve known who hunted Africa that right behind hippo’s comes the cape buffalo for being deadly/dangerous. From what I’ve read, the Gaur of India have been known to kill tigers.
Half a ton or more of angry bovine is nothing to under estimate.
My Godfather had a hobby ranch in East Texas where he bred and kept a small herd of Santa Getrudis cattle (breed developed on the King Ranch in the early 1900’s; basically a cross of Shorthorn (5/8) and Brahman (3/8)).
For a number of years, he had a purebred Brahman bull (herd had gotten too “Shorthorn”) that was bad-tempered personified. Woe betide you if you tried to take a shortcut on foot across one of the pastures where he was — he’d see and come after you on a dead run from a quarter mile away, and trying to deworm / medicate him was a bitch even for experienced cowhands.
I currently have a Black Angus bull and he’s very docile and even-tempered, but what you have to watch out for is that unlike most of the cows and the steers, he has no fear of humans at all. My beef cattle aren’t handled much and cows and steers will generally back down if you move toward them aggressively, wave a rope or stick at them or whatnot, as long as they don’t think they’re defending a calf (and even then, usually). Bulls will call your bluff, so you have to have a plan — it’s better to lure and distract than confront.
Friendly, bottle-raised or regularly-handled cattle, like dairy cattle, are actually responsible for the most injuries and deaths, because people encounter them in close quarters and let their guard down. A cow or steer can seriously injure you just because it’s playful or frisky, or in a moment of annoyance.
The size of the animal makes them dangerous in amongst fences and gates and stalls.
Never been hurt by a cow. But stepped on and bitten by a horse. Limped for a while after getting his hoof on mine.
And really watch out for pigs. Damn things are mean.
A friend of mine (retired back-country ranger at Yellowstone) has hours of tales regarding Tourons visiting National Parks.
Speaking of Disney influence, she related that multiple visitors over the years asked “What time do you turn the animals on?” Clearly they thought the wildlife was animatronic and programmed by a computer.
“Clearly they thought the wildlife was animatronic and programmed by a computer.”
They would flip the fuck out if they ever saw what really happens in the slaughterhouse to those ‘cute’ critters… š
78-80 I worked at IBP Emporia Ks. Humans did the work, recently I seen a video of the new processing plants a d most all the jobs I did are now done with a robot machine. It made me sick, makes me sick to think about it.
Just something about a machine killing and cutting up a creature ain’t right.
.
Two hobo’s were walking down the railroad tracks. They was hungry and came upon a ran over possum
One said its nasty but I’m hungry and started eating. The other hobo said he was going to wait for a hot meal.
The other hobo said ” Good luck with that.”
They walked about a half hour and all of a sudden the possum eating hobo started puking.
The other hobo said , ” See, I told you I’d get a hot meal.”
Oh-urp-my-urp-gawd
@Geoff
My hunting buddy drew a bison permit a few years ago for Gardiner, Montana. January 5th: 0 F, light “breeze” blowing the snow and ice crystals into a ground fog, 1500 hrs and he sights the perfect bull way up an arroyo. We run up the arroyo, two shots and the bull is on the ground…then the work began. There were three of us. J and his nephew did most of the butchering whilst I hauled the meat (on a toboggan over about 24″ of snow) down to the road where the truck and trailer were. We started the carcass at 1600 hrs and finished up around 2030. As big as bison are alive…they are twice as big when they are 2,000 pounds of meat, bones and guts laying there. The animal’s trachea was the size of a diesel truck exhaust pipe. The gut pile was probably 350 pounds.
J got a really nice robe and cape mount from his bison.
Nephew and I received a decent amount of meat for our help.
PS: we had a total of five good skinning knives that I kept in rotation to J and nephew. Bison is hard on a blade, as they dulled one, I would give them a fresh knife and take the dulled one to sharpen. Each knife was sharpened at least twice. The people who claim that they “skinned a buffalo with Grandpa’s Uncle Henry folder” are full of crap.
āWhat time do you turn the animals on?ā
He should have replied āWe have no interest in making the animals horny, you pervert.ā
I give common critters a wide berth, and critters bigger then me an even wider berth. Has anyone ever seen a rabid possum suddenly go wild? It’s best to have a loaded high capacity automobile ready, or at least a 12 guage shotgun.
Possum is rabid? Honary maybe, cantankerous a little but didnāt think he was rabid lol
Honary and horny, yeah… š
A rabid possum, now that’s a first.
Most are immune.
Beware the Racoon however.
Skunks are bad for it. Little girl neighbor of ours in WV got bit by a rabid skunk going to school one morning.
My understanding is that possums core body temperature is a bit low for rabies to thrive.
JWM
BTW,
It’s illegal to descent a skunk in Washington State because they are an asymptomatic carrier of rabies..
Iām always rooting for the wildlife at Yellowstone cause the tourist are ignorant. It only proves that high capacity assault cows are needed because of the sheer number of stupid people.
Lady staff member at Yellowstone told me of the day she saw the Asian tourist go to sit on the bison statue early on morning.
His wife got a more memorable video than she had planned.
Sheer luck it stood up and swatted him with its tail. Imagine that still hurt.
Had cows, horses etc try to stomp me over the years. Nature will easily win if your stupid.
I work with a couple fairly large shorthorn oxen nearly every day. These are about a year and a half old and weigh in at about 12 to 15 hundred pounds now and will likely mature to around 2000 pounds in 6 to 8 months. My Belgian mares are around 1500 pounds and the 2 geldings will go over a ton each. While I don’t fear any of these animals, I do have a healthy respect for their size and strength. Any of them could injure or kill a frail human without much effort.
These are hand raised, domestic animals. Wild animals will react to a perceived threat by either flight or fight.
I’m jealous oldmaninAL, you’ve got it going on. Live long my friend.
After working with horses, I have a lot of respect for them. If they wanted to do us harm they could easily. But they would lose their meal ticket, shelter, health care, etc.
Horses are at least as smart as dogs and are smart enough to get up to mischief just to prove they can.
A Bull will close his eyes before he hits, a cow wont.
Just about had my guts squashed out when I jumped behind the gate of a charging Charollies( did I spell that right, Sharlay.)
If you dont think a cow can fck you up grab its calf out in a pasture.
Woolarock Museum has a drive through animal looky, seen a Bull Buffalo(Bison) got out of the car and started walking towards it, ” Come here Ole Dick, come here, come here” I figured he was probably a pet being around the care takers and what not. Told a park manager about it and he said dont do that, we had that bull charge and damage a car last week.
I’ve not worked Bison but they move a whole lot faster then cattle, I bet they’d be the shits if they got pissed.
I think to get close to a buffalo you got to put on a wolf skin and crawl up to it with a rock tied on a stick.
Those pre whiteman Native Americans had to be some badass humans yup yup.
I think if I had a time machine I’d go back about 10,000 years, that was freedom. We really haven’t got freedom in today’s world, today freedom cost money.
Yep,10,000 years.
Jumped behind *a* gate.
Them Red Angus ain’t to friendly either.
Clovis Point spears were the “Assault Weapon” of that prehistoric era.
One spear, multiple points easily “reloaded” like a semi-automatic rifle.
Led to the extinction of the Western Hemisphere’s “unarmed” original horses.
If you dont think a cow can fck you up grab its calf out in a pasture.
I do that a bunch of times every year. I rope and castrate the bull calves in a corral with their moms standing right next to me. Two of us holding the calf down, one of us cutting.
Saw a newborn out in the pasture this spring and when they’re that young they’ll let you come up and touch them*, so my daughter and I caught him and banded him right out there in the pasture, again with the mom standing right there and the rest of the herd looking on.
Weirdly, they’ll charge a coyote or dog that comes near their calf, but not us humans.
*It would be great if we could do that every time, but they’re on open pasture and woods and they tend to hide their calves away for the first couple days, so sometimes you don’t even know they’re born until they’re a day or two older and more wary.
I’ve had the mom just stand there and watch too, and sometimes not.
I was thinking why, might have had something to do with I was new to the herd and the ones that charged were first time calf bearers?
Charolais.
My neighbor had a charolais bull of about 2000lbs who busted into my pasture one time. I chased him back by holding a 3’x6′ rectangle of hot tub cover over my head. At one point he jumped about 4′ straight up and kicked his rear legs out. His musculature was impressive.
Another time one of my young bulls got into that big white boy’s pasture and would not stop pestering him. Eventually I just had to run up and start shoving and yelling to separate them and get my bull back home. The charolais looked at me as if the say “Thanks.”
Good times.
Some of you may remember this > https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/calling-forth-the-militia-armed-americans-need-to-make-ready-to-defend-themselves/#comment-6830431
Yesterday, there was a request for more of this aid as the threat environment has, lets call it, ‘grown’. Today we are responding to that request. And also yesterday, the fourth ‘class’ of graduates of these people from a local range training six day course (where I got my training > outlined here > https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/now-out-paul-markels-how-to-shoot-better-than-a-navy-seal/#comment-6870552)
Today, Tuesday the 17th, is the SCotUS oral arguments for USA v. Rahimi.
This one can be *huge*, potentially returning many convicted felons to be able to ‘keep and bear arms’ again.
I look forward to LKB’s take on how the Justices received the arguments…
Touron in Yellowstone was watching a large herd of Elk, there was a Park Ranger monitoring the crowd when the touron approached him and wanted to know where the corrals were that they herded the Elk into at night!
The same place they keep the cats and bears
The Cape Buffalo has just entered the chat…..
Flaca Garcia
And all you can see is *ssholes and elbows scrambling to get the hell out of the way… š