Meanwhile, On Another Planet...

The Alabama bureau leads a much different life than we here at Underbelly Central:

I sent three big calves to the sale yesterday so I'm hearing a lot of mooing today from sad mama cows...

Sometimes it can be a problem separating the calves going to the sale from the rest of the herd -- bull, other calves and their mamas, but it worked out real well. The main thing is to keep them calm. I pen them up in the area where i feed them. Then, I man a gate while Billy, who hauls them to the sale for me, and my ex brother in law, Jim, try to send the bull, mama cows, and calves not going to the sale, toward the gate. At the same time, they try to keep the calves going to the sale away from the gate. when that's done, We run the ones headed to the sale through the barn, which
opens from the feeding pen, into Billy's cattle trailer. if things dont work out right, they can all go through or over fences or through that gate.

Mama cows whose calves went to the sale yesterday will bawl for three days or so. ...

What made it especially interesting is while all that was going on yesterday morning, the bull was trying to breed one of the cows. That is something you don't want to interfere with or get in the way of. He was on her while I was still manning the gate as the other cows and the little calves not going to the sale were coming out.

Maybe this is what Rebecca West had in mind when she said that "Ladies are more accustomed to not being amused than gentlemen seem to realize."