Deadly farm animals
Kim has a story about Killer Cows, and it brought back a memory of my childhood.
My Best Friend (at the time, turned out later to be an obnoxious twit)had a grampa who lived in his house, who had a “dirt farm”. Actually, a couple dozen acres of clay and topsoil, he had a lot of old gas and diesel powered equipment and we used to go out there and tear shit up. Dig holes. Fill them again. Dig trenches, try to get the dzer stuck in them. That sort of thing.
Anyway, the old man had a couple jennys out on the property, and one was tame enough to ride. Unfortunately, I was shorter than my friend and haqd a hard time getting on by myself, and my friend spent most of his time riding.
The other jenny was a damned mean old bitch. More than once I felt the sting of one of those hind legs against my side or back, and if i think about it, I can recall the intense pain.
Neither of them had names, just jennys, and I made up my mind i was going to go for a ride. I pulled a bunch of timothy hay and piled it up near the front tire of an abandoned dump truck. The mean old jenny came over and started grazing, and as she did, I hopped from the cab onto her back.
I latched onto that old girl’s mane just as hard as I could. The effect was as predictable as it was instantaneous, she began to buck and kick out as hard as she could, and I held on ever tighter. Then, she did something I would never have guessed a mule could do: She turned her goddamned head around and bit my belly. I felt like a wad of my skin had been clamped in a vise, and I started trying a little harder to vacate my position. By this time, she had a good hold on me, and ran around in a circle, whacking my ribs against the bottom edge of the dump truck gate several times. When I finally managed to wrest my gut back from her teeth, I was sore and scared shitless. I climbed up into the bed of that dump truck only to find it had been filled, some time ago, with multiflora rose that had been cut from all over the property. The brittle, dry spines jabbed my skin and hurt like hell. I just wanted to be away from the jenny, though, so I dealt with it.
Later, I told kids I had gotten in a fight. The bruise on my stomach was the size of the bottom of a 5 lb coffee can. It looked like I had been shot. Later, it faded so the only remaining mark was of the mule’s teeth. I didn’t show anyone at that stage.
So: Cows, non threatening. Mules, bulls, stay away.
Ah, that brings back memories of being chased by my neighbor’s bull when I was out quail hunting by myself one day. I thought I was going to have to buy myself a bull with the 12 guage.
Good thing about bulls is they don’t run for very long. Usually.
You’re lucky it didn’t kill you.
Your pain made for a good story though.
Is it me, or did you always seem to get urself into situations like that when you were a kid? ;)
it’s not you.
Got chased by a bull one time as a kid – I went walking through a field I shouldn’t have been walking through at that time of the year. The farmer had put his bull out there to keep him away from the other bulls in the herd, and let’s just say that bull had a lot of built-up tension it wanted to work out. It saw me and my friend strolling along and went apeshit. The bull went clean through the fence we leaped over, and only stopped when it clocked itself silly against a pine tree.
I went home, changed my shorts and looked around veeeeeery carefully whenever I had to cross that field from then on.
As for mules – my dad taught me a handy trick when dealing with a balky mule – lemon drops. Works on donkeys too. Just feed ’em a lemon drop and they’ll do whatever you want as long as they’ve got the taste in their mouth. But you’d better have a good supply with you. Nothing’s worse than a pissed off mule on a sugar high who’s demanding more candy. Still, one bag did the trick.
We used the lemondrop trick on junkyard dogs when we were kids swiping radios.
We used Oreos instead.
At last…the real reason behind the scar.