The one time I needed to be Patient

Yes you maybe think I’m a very patient person but to be honest with you I am not I am a short fuse waiting to go off any second, there have been many times I needed to be patient and i was not so it kicked me in the butt for the long run but there was time I really needed to be patient and one of those times was in 2019 at Pittston fair with my steers Teddy and Bear, they were the sweetest steers ever and they were so gentle that any loud or maybe a mean voice would set them off and they would get scared. They were one year old at the time when I took them to the fair for a pulling event. They had not done much for pulling and there was quite a bit of weight on the drag about 75 percent of their weight. The 75 percent I should have known that it was too heavy, I hadnt practiced enough but I really wanted to do it with them so we tried it was was a huge mistake because they had a hard time and I had to be really patient almost talk to them like babies and “hold there hand” through it. Yes this helped at the time but after this I really had to learn to be patient because we had a long road ahead of us.

Once I noticed that they had started to struggle quite a bit on the load they had I knew I had to be patient, so many people were watching in the grandstands and I knew if I got upset people would notice and get upset and so would my steers so I was very very good with my steers and worked with them. Not only was I being patient but so were Teddy and Bear. My steers worked with me very well. I was very calm and tried to speak to them calmly and nicely and just got them to go a little ways down the pulling ring. I was not expecting a whole lot of an outcome from them, but I wanted them to be able to prove to themselves that they could pull it out and not get discouraged. Many pairs of steers if you do not work with them to get their courage up they will never want to pull for you again, even if it is just a small load. It’s not because they do not want to, it is because they think they can’t haul the weight out.

This event taught me a huge lesson about being patient with my animals, even the ones that I had after Teddy and Bear. I have had many teams that I have not had patience with and nothing good has come out of it whatsoever. For example my pair that I just got are the biggest brats ever and throw the biggest tantrums, but I stay very calm and patient with them and they soon learn that even though they want to be little brats it’s not going to make me think any different. That helps with them thinking they can get away with things because most of the time they do not get away with things.

“Cattle” by generalising is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0