Topper wasn't being mean. He was being pushed, and nobody likes getting pushed around: not people, not dogs, and certainly not bovines. Push on a steer, and his instinct is to push back. When a steer pushes back, the steer wins—every time.
Last week a fifteen-year-old steer with a six-foot horn span backed off a trailer into my barnyard, and Curious Bleu — who has not hurried anywhere in three years — hurried.
Molly Potter and Rose DeFreitas were 11 and 12 the summer they showed up at the Miles Smith Farm Summer Camp in 2022. They met on day one. Each was handed a calf to train, and that's when it started — friendship with each other, and love of cattle.
Cattle are having a moment. Scottish Highlands especially — the shaggy, horned supermodels of the bovine world. After a year off, my cattle (and I) have been invited back to the Highland Games in Lincoln.
Anyone raising long-haired Highland cattle — or honestly any bovine with a tail, which is most of them — knows what I'm talking about. The burrs have invaded, and they've brought two different armies. I spend a chunk of every August with scissors in my hand, prying burrs from bovine ears.
We know the benefits of therapy dogs and the remarkable healing of therapy horses, but cattle deserve the same recognition: their healing qualities have been largely ignored...until now.
