AI in case you didn’t know, stands for Artificial Insemination which I seem to have spent most of the week involved in.

ai

Believe me the only ones that seem to get any pleasure out of it are our dogs who were almost besides themselves at getting the chance to round up our cattle not once, but three times this week!

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For the rest of us it involved a lot of bellowing and galloping around the fields and the cows had a good canter too!

This morning though, for some reason we seemed to get it all wrong! Might be something to do with hubby’s night on the beer, but someone and I’m not saying who, left the gate open into the hay field!

Just imagine trying to get a starving man away from a gourmet banquet and you’ll get the idea! Not that our cows are starving, but they are greedy. Eating machines in fact when you see what goes in one end and then out the other!

Eventually we did get the whole lot into the barn but that was just the start of our problems! Our intended victim soon sussed the situation and flatly refused to enter the crush even to the point of ignoring a tasty bribe from a bucket!

We eventually managed to pen her up near the entrance, but backwards! More sweating and swearing later we finally got her turned around and then into the crush, just moments before the AI man arrived.

Best of all, I’m in the middle of writing an article about cattle artificial insemination. When I look at what I’ve written it all sounds ridiculously easy! Oh well, at least I’ve got some decent photos!

Calves

Hopefully we'll be getting some little fellows like this next year!