Adding cattle events like boxing, sorting, and cutting to your riding activities is a big step in your horsemanship. As with any advancement in your riding, your foundational training and riding abilities play a large role. But when you add cattle to the mix, you also must be able to read those cows to effectively work them.
Reading a cow means recognizing traits, whether they’re based on breed or other factors, that help identify how that cow will react to your horse. Here are my top tips for someone learning about cows.
Tip 1: Insert Yourself
The most impactful way I learned to read cows was just being around a lot of them, whether it was in a pasture or a catch pen. You can start to connect movements to reactions and physical traits to common responses. Pay attention to if they run away, act relaxed, or just plain don’t want to move. Look for a cow that’s attentive to your horse. You want one that looks at him and seems like he’ll honor your horse.
Tip 2: Observe
In the cutting, they spend an average of 20 minutes settling a herd for a set of horses. That settling time represents education for you. Whether you’re at the event in person or watching online, paying attention to how the cows react to the settler’s horse and to each other gets you started. Then you can start to notice commonalities between reactions and physical traits as well as responses to different movements by the horse. To speed up your education, sit with someone well versed in reading cattle who can point out those reactions and movements. Pay attention to what causes a cow to move away? What are the traits of a cow that doesn’t respond at all?
You’ll start to notice in the cow horse and other events where the cows get worked multiple times that the cow shows you who he is, for the most part. I’ve judged cow horse shows where I saw a cow get worked out of the herd and be dull, and when he comes in for the boxing or fence work, he hasn’t changed a bit. It works the same for the wild cows.
Tip 3: Learn About Cows
A lot of reading cows comes down to instinct and experience. With time, you’ll learn things like a cow with a full belly and a slightly fuzzier coat might be easier to handle and a little slower. If he’s thin-bodied and has a slick coat, he might have a little more go. There are also traits associated with a cow’s head shape. A square-headed cow might be a little smarter than a cow with a thin, long head. A slow-footed cow might seem like one you could beat to a turn, but he can also fool you. After being in cutting and cow horse for 50-plus years, I can still cut a cow that’ll fool the heck out of me now and then. It’s all anecdotal and based on generalities, but it’s a solid start to build your cow knowledge. With a little insight you can make some educated assumptions that’ll help you.