Paint Your Cattle - Remember They Can’t Read Or Can They?

Presently we don’t have any cattle here on the farm. Having to rely heavily on volunteer help, either beef cattle or dairy cattle simply became far too much for us to handle. When we did however have cattle, we had a little trick to help us identify them out in the field, I would just spray them with Quik Shot Livestock Marking Paint. It comes in bright fluorescent colors. It also helped the volunteers also because to someone who doesn’t know the herd, they all look alike.
 
Sometimes I’d number the critters, or if a specific animal was named Eve for example, I might spray an E on her. It’s also an easy way to identify an animal going off to calve or to keep track of one coming into heat. I’ve even had neighbors stop and say, ‘It looks like #5 is going to be calving soon.’
 
I once had this fantastic idea for promoting the ministry, I got the idea from an article I once read. This rancher lettered some critters to spell “Eat Beef” Sounded so good, I thought we’d give it a try. I’d put a letter on each animal, and my cattle would be walking billboard.
 
But something happened to change my mind. When my neighbors started asking me, ‘What’s “AASHQU CHPAT” mean? Those knot head critter were supposed to spell out “SQUASH PATCH”! That kind of changed my mind.
 
Anyone who has worked cattle for more than 10 minutes knows that they are not the sharpest crayons in the box. They also would rather stand around munching on grass than going where you want them to go. But come on, you would think they could do just one simple thing like staying in the line we had them in. I'm not the smartest fella around but it didn’t take long for me to figure out that Cows don’t know how to spell.
 
I wonder if the rancher in that article had the same problem? Maybe his cattle spelled out “TEA FEBE”. If they did,  maybe cattle can spell after all.