Haint Bull

[Ky hills]

Either Sunday or Monday night of last week, can’t remember for sure it’s been such a busy week with multiple BnB changeovers and VBS at our church, we thought we heard a bull bellering which was kind of out of character as our current bull is fairly quiet most of the time. It was late almost dark. We drove down in the pasture and saw our bull standing in a hayfield that we’ve just left open for them this year, and the cows had come out into the main pasture. Bull was agitated and bellering up a storm and then we also heard another bull. So we drove over to a corner that joins a neighboring property that has a few cattle but doesn’t really any sort of management outside of the neighbors dealing with them when they become an issue. So there we find a big bull bellering back and forth with our bull, but they were not in contact with each other yet at that point. That bull stayed for a few minutes and just seemed to vanish into the night. Neighbor said it was not her’s.
I contacted another neighbor that joins both us and the aforementioned neighbor. He said he would check to make sure their bulls were home which he confirmed the next day they were home. We didn’t know whether to take the first neighbor 100% at their word that it wasn’t theirs. The next day no sign of the bull and we had too much going to move our cattle then because we had to get 3 downed ash trees off an interior fence before we could move them and just didn’t have time or endurance to do that before VBS. I checked on the situation each day and still didn’t see any signs of the bull.
Then Friday night after VBS, checked on the cattle and it had hit the fan. Mystery bull was back in the corner next to us and our bull was on our side of the fence and they had a heck of an argument going. Then just like the first night we saw it, the bull just disappeared while we were trying to get ours away from the fence. Our bull is just a few months past 3 years old and he’s not been too concerned with smaller bulls across the fence from him, but this one really set him off. We were in the Polaris and at one point both my wife and I thought he was going to have go at the Polaris he was so fired up. Between me and the dog trying to turn him, he finally did and after a couple attempts to drive him away with the Polaris once he turned around, he finally went over the hill and up another hill where the cows were. The next day got the trees off and cattle moved to a new pasture, away from any neighboring property, just an interior field of ours with some distance between any neighboring fields.
I put a post on a local neighborhood fb group about the bull to see if anybody was missing one. Someone contacted me from several miles away saying they had lost a young bull several months ago.
Said their bull had a brand on it. I haven’t seen a the bull in question in daylight or good enough to tell if it’s got a brand or not. Said to let them know if I see a brand.
There’s around 30 acres of grown up wilderness in that adjoining property where the bull showed up at and it isn’t staying with the few cows on that property so I don’t have any idea where it’s going and coming from and nobody seems to know anything about it.
It’s almost like it’s a haint (that’s Appalachian word for ghost)
The other day after sawing the trees off the fence and tacking the fence back up I took my hammer and hit one of the downed trees a couple times like them fellers on them Sasquatch shows. I figured maybe I might have just as much success drawing out a Sasquatch as solving the mystery of that hainted bull.
I even got bad blurry picture of the hainted bull like the blurry inconclusive picures they get of alleged Sasquatches.

 

[kenny thomas]

With current prices im pretty sure he is mine. Just take him to the stockyard and send me a check. Minus your haul bill of course.

 

[Ky hills]

With current prices im pretty sure he is mine. Just take him to the stockyard and send me a check. Minus your haul bill of course.

That’s the thing, I’d think with the prices anybody could afford to have the thing rodeoed into a trailer.
I don’t believe I’ll be tackling that project though as the last time we tried loading bulls that came from that property I ended up being ran by one of the bulls ever time he stopped, and almost had my arm broke while trying to shut the trailer door after the cowboy had roped and drug him into the trailer.
I haven’t seen this bull again since Friday night. I think it must be going and coming into that property from somewhere else. The property owner said last week she’d check her fence in a few days. Probably that few days could be translated as she won’t. I didn’t notice any of her cows in her field today so they may have followed the bull to somewhere else, which she probably won’t realize unless somebody honest finds them and tells her, then it will be up to them to get them back to her.

 

[TCRanch]

That is one gnarly looking bull.

 

[Katpau]

This is one of the reasons I am limiting the time my cows are in with the bull to just 45 days. We did it last year and we were all done calving in just 31 days total, of which only 22 of those days went beyond the 280 days after turnout. Once most of our cows are bred, we have issues with bulls trying to get through the fence, but if I remove them before that happens, I don't need to worry about my bull getting in a fight with the neighbors bull. We ship the opens, but there aren't many of those. I do try to keep the cattle away from perimeter fencing when the bulls are in, but yesterday we had some next to the neighbors and we already had a bull out. This group of cows was synchronized and AI bred on 5-12 and the ones that did not settle would have been back in heat the first week of June. There is not much for the bull to do right now.

We were down checking on a cow in the corrals with a calf that has a nasty cut on its leg, and I was thinking it was going to be an easy day. I knew that we had a group of cows against the perimeter fence, but we had checked them the day before and the neighbors cows were in a pasture up the hill and it looked like they were closed out from getting along side ours. We decided to check them again since we were so close. We found our cows up against the fence and could see the neighbors cows and at least one bull were now right on the other side. Our bull was nowhere to be seen. While we stood there, a large herd of about 40-50 elk came down through the oak trees, bounced along our fence and then took off back up the hill after seeing us.

We traveled along the fence for a good half mile or more and could see that the top wire was off the fence in numerous locations, probably from the elk. We finally found the bull, laying all by himself on the neighbors side, near a good size gap in the wire. He looked like he'd had a rough night. he is just a two year old, and the other bull had a big weight advantage. The top and bottom wire were still up, so it wasn't likely we could get him to go back through there, so we pushed him along the fence away from his cows to the closest gate. He was a good boy, and didn't give us much trouble. Now we were about a mile from his cows and we had to move him back through another gate to get back to them. I left my husband walking the bull, and went on ahead to get the cows away from the fence. By the time the bull arrived, I had the cows gathered and we were heading for another gate so we could move the cows across the creek, through the corrals and into an interior pasture. Our 10 minute cow check had turned into a half day project.

Here he is waiting for his girls by the feed barn. They shared a small bale of hay to reward them for coming up to the corrals when called. He was too tired to even join them for the hay.

 

[RDFF]

Nice looking animal.