Osage oranges, hedge apples, hedge balls, monkey brains – whatever nickname you know them by, they are also cattle chokers and potential killers. If a hedge apple or piece obstructs the esophagus, anything the animal eats or drinks will come back up and be vomited out. Bloating will also likely occur as gas accumulates in the rumen and the animal is unable to belch it up.
 
Our hedge apple crisis occurred one evening during the week in November when we worked cattle. Yes, just one more incident to deal with near the end of an already long day!
 
Below is a picture of a hedge apple on our property.

Hedge apples are the fruit of hedge, also known as Osage orange, trees. Lime green in color and usually about the size of a softball—although they can be much larger and weigh as much as four pounds—they ripen and drop from the trees in late summer and fall. Even the smaller ones are heavy for their size and because they are also very hard, if you’re walking under a tree and get beaned by one, you can probably expect a knot to develop at the point of impact. A four-pounder is a concussive experience!
 
Unfortunately, there are many hedge trees in the timber on our property. Trying to keep the balls picked up or cutting down the trees are not practical options. So far, we’ve been lucky our cattle prefer grass and hay, even though we occasionally see a cow chewing on something that makes her foam at the mouth. It’s undoubtedly a hedge apple, but at least she’s chewing it, not trying to swallow it whole.
 
But this fall, our luck nearly ran out.
 
Late in the afternoon after a long day of working cattle, Bill left to take a trailer load to the ranch and Cricket and I set out on our evening walk. We’d circled the perimeter of the pasture and were headed to the water tank to get Cricket a drink when I heard a calf bawling non-stop and distressed. I detoured away from the tank and up a short hill to the bale feeder. Most of the cows were either at the feeder or nearby and the calves were having supper. One little calf was standing off to the side, bawling its head off, probably because it was hungry. I checked the ear tag, #216, and searched the cows for a matching number. No mama near the feeder. Then I remembered seeing a cow at the water tank.
 
The cow at the tank was the matching mama, Ginger. She was drinking so I gave Cricket her drink while I waited for the cow to finish, assuming she would go to her calf. Ginger drank for several minutes then just stood at the tank, not moving, apparently ignoring her bawling calf. My first thought in a situation like this is to try to drive the cow to the calf. Bill says to just leave them alone and they will figure it out. That’s really hard for me to do!
 
As I was debating what to do, Ginger lowered her head and expelled what appeared to be water followed by foam from her mouth. I’d never seen this happen. She drank more water, then moved away from the tank. I moved behind her and tried to drive her up the short hill to her calf. She took a few lethargic steps, then stopped and expelled more water and foam. I gently prodded her flank to encourage her to move and noticed her side felt hard, no give at all. I backed up a step and looked at her. Her sides were rounded like she was carrying a calf! I knew that couldn’t be possible.
 
After ignoring my repeated attempts to drive her, Ginger slowly walked away from the tank but not toward her calf. I decided to wait until Bill returned home and tell him about this situation.
 
After listening to my explanation, Bill said Ginger was bloated. The foaming at the mouth could indicate she’d swallowed a hedge apple and it was lodged in her esophagus since she couldn’t keep water down. He went to the pasture and found Ginger and her calf together near the water tank. He verified the cow was bloated but she didn’t seem to be in distress, so decided to wait until the next day to do anything. He would do some internet research and consult with a vet for guidance.
 
The next day was another long one of working and hauling. Bill checked on Ginger early in the morning. She was in the same area, still lethargic and ignored his attempts to get her to walk. Herding her to the barn and into the chute to deal with the suspected blockage would be impossible. Late in the afternoon after Bill left with the last load, Cricket and I headed to the pasture for our walk and to check on Ginger. Her calf was with the rest of the herd near the feeders and wasn’t bawling this time. We had assumed it was at least getting grain from the creep feeder and, hopefully, a little milk from Ginger or one of the other cows.
 
Ginger wasn’t with the herd so I checked the water tank—not there either. Knowing that in her weakened, lethargic state she couldn’t have wandered far, I searched hidden areas like tall grass, ditches and the creek. My hopes of finding her alive were quickly slipping, like sliding down a muddy bank to a bottomless creek.
 
And that’s where I found her—in the creek. But it wasn’t bottomless; there was only about a foot of water in it. She was lying down but had her head up. She was alive!
 
Since the bank on my side of the creek was steep and Ginger was nearer to the opposite bank, I trotted back about thirty yards to the homemade concrete-and-rock bridge, crossed over and doubled back to Ginger’s location. I wasn’t dressed for creek-wading, wearing tennis shoes and not my gumboots, so I grabbed a stick and carefully worked my way down the bank. There was a rocky area beside her where I stood and gently prodded her with the stick, trying to encourage her to stand. She either wouldn’t or couldn’t get up and after several minutes of prodding, I left her to go back to the house and wait for Bill. I saw that she was still bloated.
 
The vet Bill consulted agreed Ginger very likely had a hedge apple stuck in her esophagus that blocked anything from going down to the rumen and prevented her from belching which resulted in bloating. He advised Bill to cut a length of small diameter garden hose and remove the fitting on the end. Carefully guide the hose down the cow’s throat, around the hedge apple and into the rumen to release the gas. Then use a longer length of larger diameter hose to push the blockage down to the rumen.
 
When Bill arrived home he fashioned the de-bloating hoses. Then we gathered up the rest of the supplies: rechargeable spotlight and pruning shears to make adjustments on the hose pieces. We loaded the mini-truck, put on our gumboots and headed for the creek.
 
Ginger was in the same place I’d left her. We carried the supplies down the bank, I held the spotlight and Bill carefully waded in. Fortunately, we’d been having mild weather but both the air and water temperatures were cool—not a good night for a moonlight swim! Ginger was still strong enough to resist Bill’s efforts to guide the hose down her throat but too weak to get up and walk away. After several attempts, he finally pushed enough hose into her mouth to go down her throat. He continued to feed the hose into her mouth and shortly, we heard the hissing sound of released gas. This wonderful sound lasted several minutes and was accompanied by a delightfully obnoxious odor! Well, considering the last 24 hours and the alternative, a dead cow, it was delightful to us!
 
Once the de-bloating and dislodging procedure was complete, Bill tried to get Ginger up but she was still too weak from the ordeal. We left her, packed up the supplies and drove back to the house.
 
The next morning when Bill checked on her, she was up and on dry land, the calf was nursing and life was good! A couple of weeks later, Bill hauled this pair and four pairs of late-calving cows and their calves to the ranch.

Any chore Bill asks me to do with an explanation that begins “All you have to do is…” and ends with “…Should be a piece of cake!” is a potential farm fiasco. I learned this the hard way—no surprise!—a few years ago. The chore he assured me would take only twenty minutes morphed into an epic adventure of over two hours! This saga, “From Piece of Cake to Piece of Cow Pie,” became one of the longest chapters in my book. Here’s a shortened version of what went down then.
 
It was November. Bill was working cattle and hauling them to the ranch where they would spend the winter. I was still working full-time and not yet a Cattle-Working Apprentice. These were his instructions for the chore he asked me to do late one afternoon:
 
“I need to load out the cows and calves in Bobbie’s pasture first thing tomorrow morning, but I can’t load from Bobbie’s so they need to be moved over to John’s pasture. Take the little truck and go over to John’s pasture. Drive to his back fence and go through the little gate to Bobbie’s pasture and look for the cows and calves. They’re probably at the bale feeder by the pond. Rattle a bucket of range cubes to get their attention, and when they start to follow you, drive the truck back through the little gate. Once they’re all in John’s pasture, shut the gate and you’re done. Should take about twenty minutes max. Piece of cake!”
 
Then he added, “Oh, and take a five-gallon bucket of grain. When the first few cows go through the gate to John’s pasture, dump grain on the ground to keep them occupied so they won’t be tempted to go back through. Then grab the bucket of range cubes, walk back to Bobbie’s pasture and round up any stragglers.”
 
Twenty minutes, huh? I loaded the two buckets in the back, Cricket jumped in the cab to ride shotgun and off we went.
 
I’d been to these pastures previously with Bill to check cows and calves, but never on a solo mission. Plus, I’d never herded more than one or two cows by myself. Supposedly simple tasks were about to become monumental obstacles.
 
There were gates, three of them. Two were heavy tubular steel swing gates that I lugged open and shut to enter John’s pasture. The third gate that Bill referred to as the “little gate,” the one between the two pastures, was a bona fide antique: four strands of barbed wire strung between three small hedge posts. Here’s a picture of a similar gate in one of our pastures. This gate has fence stays instead of hedge posts to keep the barbed wire from sagging.

Opening the gate wasn’t too difficult. The challenge was closing it. I had to pick up the end post and drag the gate across the opening, pull it tight, position the bottom end of the post in a wire loop near the ground, then pull the post even tighter and muscle the top loop down over the top end of the post. The first picture below shows a gate post on the left and a fence post on the right. The second pic shows the bottom wire loop and the third pic, the top loop.

I struggled with this gate not just once but twice because, after the cows and calves were transferred from Bobbie’s to John’s, I didn’t realize until we were more than halfway across John’s pasture that two calves were missing. I had counted cows, but the herd headed across the pasture before I could count calves. This meant going back to the other pasture to find the calves who probably realized they were alone and frantically searching for their mamas, aunts and cousins. Then I had to herd the panic-stricken little calves to the gate, through it and toward the rest of the cows and calves. The sun had set and dusk was rapidly changing to dark. When I tried to find the lever to turn on the truck lights, I washed the windshield instead!
 
There were other obstacles: A deeply rutted area in my driving path that, if not navigated carefully and with four-wheel drive finesse, would result in getting high-centered. Four-wheel drive is useless if the tires don’t touch the ground. On one trip through this area, referred to in my book as the “Valley of the Shadow of Deep Ruts,” I dropped the front end of the truck into a hole. In attempting to engage four-wheel drive I pulled up on the emergency brake lever instead, then couldn’t figure out how to disengage it. Blaspheming ensued!
 
After I fought with the old gate and navigated through the “Valley of the Shadow of Deep Ruts,” the cows found the buckets of the left-over grain and range cubes in the truck bed and ransacked it, upsetting the buckets, rocking the truck and making me run a bovine gauntlet to get in and out of the cab.
 
That epic adventure, which started out as a “piece of cake” and quickly degenerated into a piece of…um…cow pie, was a defining moment—a two-hour moment—in my life as a farm wife.
 
Fast-forward to this year. Late the afternoon of the first day of working cattle, as Bill was leaving for the ranch with a trailer-load, he stopped and asked me, “Can you run over to John’s and Bobbie’s pastures and move the cows and calves so I can load them from John’s tomorrow morning?” Again, the instructions started with “All you have to do is…” and ended with “…Should be a piece of cake!” There it was: “From Piece of Cake to Piece of Cow Pie” déjà vu!
 
The instructions were mostly the same as before. But this year’s potential epic adventure rerun would be simpler. Bill had replaced the barbed wire gate with a hinged one made of tubular steel with a chain and clip fastener, similar to the one pictured below.

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​He also had bladed and smoothed the hazardous rutted area.
 
When I arrived at the new gate between the two pastures, the cows and calves were all near the fence. I shook the bucket of range cubes and they came running, including all the calves. No stragglers. As per instructions, I led them across John’s pasture to the catch pen, poured grain in the feed bunk and tossed flakes of hay on the ground. Bill would come over the next morning and call them back to the catch pen. Expecting to be fed, they would respond with great gusto!
 
This year’s “From Piece of Cake to Piece of Cow Pie” potential farm fiasco only took about thirty minutes: no “Valley of the Shadow of Deep Ruts,” no old barbed wire gate, no stragglers, no ransacking the bed of the truck to get to the grain and no blaspheming! Hallelujah!

Our bulls? Bad boys? Kruger and Romeo, who will follow Bill anywhere with a bucket of range cubes?

Our two bulls are usually mild-mannered unless they are near each other or another bull, or don’t have plenty of female companionship to keep them occupied at their life’s purpose. Actually, they’re just normal bulls.
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Romeo

Kruger

Side Note: Naming a bull Romeo may seem self-explanatory, but he actually is descended from a line of bulls that have Romeo as part of their name. Kruger was not named after former K-State basketball star and coach, Lon Kruger, or any of the long line of athletes to come out of Silver Lake, KS. He is a descendant of Mr. Krugerrand, one of the top-rated Angus bulls. This line is known for siring low birth weight calves, also known as a calving-ease bull.
 
Since we do fall calving, the bulls breed our cows at the ranch where they all spend the winter. The boys are occupied and deliriously happy for a couple of months. Then, the breeding slows down but not the testosterone production, and boredom sets in. They realize, “Hey! There’s competition here! I’m gonna kick his butt and let him know who rules!”
 
In my book, I called this “Bored Bull Syndrome.”  To keep these expensive, egotistical, beefy hunks from seriously injuring each other, when Bill is certain all the cows have been bred, he loans out the bulls to a couple of neighbors to breed their cows.
 
After we finished working and hauling cattle a few weeks ago, Bill rearranged and reinforced the corral pens in preparation for bringing the bulls home from neighbors. They would need a “getting reacquainted” period after not seeing each other since early last spring. Bill put them in adjacent corral pens, one with a cow and the other with a replacement heifer to hopefully provide feminine calming influence, i.e., to keep them from getting bored and going at each other. The cow hadn’t yet calved and the replacement heifer had already come into heat a few days prior, so they were provided as company, not for breeding.
 
It didn’t take long for the boys to figure out their female companions were decoys, not provided for their breeding pleasure. We heard them bellowing bull smack at each other. When I went to the corral to take photos of the bulls in their pens, I found fence panels scattered on the ground and the boys engaged in head-to-head combat, pushing each other back and forth. 

Bill was gone and I wasn’t about to interfere and risk getting maimed. Neither were the cow and replacement heifer; they stood back out of the way. Within a couple of minutes, Romeo backed down, allowing Kruger to claim bull supremacy. Fortunately, no blood was shed and there were no apparent injuries, although Romeo was breathing heavily. When Bill returned, he rebuilt and refortified the pens.

​A few days later, Bill hauled the bad boys to the ranch.