How Cattle Escape

Taking care of cows requires that you wear several hats during your tenure and not all of them are cowboy hats. Most of the time, you are like a warden, just keeping an eye on things and preventing problems from arising. You make sure the cattle have everything they need: food, water and salt as well as a safe pasture to call home. Sometimes, however, a cow can seem to be Houdini reincarnated and escape your pasture to go visit the neighbor. You have change hats and become a detective to figure out just how a cow got through a perfectly good fence.

Tubby was just your average Black Angus heifer. Yet she could get through a welded wire fence magically. The fence had four foot high welded wire on the bottom and two strands of barbed-wire across the top. The fence was in great repair, yet every morning, Tubby was at the neighbors' house ready to get in the trailer to be hauled back to our pasture.

The neighbor and I both checked and re-checked the shared fence line. It seemed impossible that a 800 pound heifer could get through anywhere, much less through the reinforced fence line. There were no broken posts and no tracks to tell us how she got through the fence. The fence was well over five foot high so jumping was unlikely. Just how did she do it, and more importantly, how do we stop her from getting through?

It was this mystery that led up to make a startling discovery. Tubby knew something most other cows never guessed at. Tubby could squat down by spreading her front legs apart, and then arch her back to get under anything she wanted to.

While the welded wire fence was secured with barbed wire in most places, there were three fence posts that were not tied at the bottom. Tubby had discovered this little oversight. She would go to the middle post and push her nose under the fence, then squat down and wiggle her way beneath the fence. The welded wire fence would fall into place behind her leaving no clue as to how she did her Houdini act. Because the fence posts were on my side of the fence, she could not come back home on her own. Instead, she would graze her way to the neighbors' and wait patiently for a ride home.

It took us several weeks to catch the heifer in the act and discover her little secret. It took ten minutes to stop her wandering. We just wired the bottom of the welded wire to the fence posts and stopped Tubby from visiting the neighbors. The neighbors and I had a good laugh when she next tried her little trick. It took her a while to realize that we had plugged her hole and she could not get through.

Cows are smarter than you think they would be. How Tubby first discovered her hole and how she became so adept at using it is anyone's guess. Once a cow does find a hole, they will continue to use it to escape until you figure out how to stop them.