COWBOY WAY
PART 5 OF SIX
CATTLE HANDLING
Pulling Bulls Without the Drama By DYLAN BIGGS
TK Ranch hand Dexter Dedora and his gelding, JJ, moving the bull out from the herd
T PHOTO COURTESY TK RANCH
here are always times when one needs to drive single animals to the corrals, to a new pasture or back to the pasture where they belong. Driving singles probably generates more cattle tales than any other cattle-related work. Back in the day, pulling bulls in the fall always guaranteed a rodeo of calamity for us. There’d be chasing, cussing, rope-whipping, bulls on the fight, dragging and inevitable injuries from minor to broken bones and always fence to repair. The harder the fight, the better the tales to tell. Looking back, I was guilty of too much boy and not enough cow and lucky to avoid serious injury or worse. When one does things a certain way long enough, that way becomes the norm. So when Bud Williams was sitting at our kitchen table and asked what troubles I was having working our cattle, I couldn’t immediately answer his question except for with a rather feeble, “I’m not sure,” to which he stood up and pounded his fist down on the table saying, “then what the hell am I here cowboycountrymagazine.com
Finding the stop
for!” Needless to say, that got me thinking, and by morning I had a few troubles to share. Until one is taught something new, you don’t know what you didn’t know, and of course the animal is singled out as the sole troublemaker. I never knew there was a progressive way to get an animal driving under control. I didn’t know I needed control of the hip (similar to a clutch) and control of the head (a steering wheel) so that I could 35
