Stray Cows

Living in the country we always have had problems with stray dogs and stray cats showing up and causing problems at our place.How many people have problems with stray cattle? As I've mentioned before, our place is surrounded by government land which lease grazing rights to people with cattle. For the past six years, we've had problems with stray cattle coming in and taking over. In the past we've stressed out over it. In the past, we've herded the intruders out, mended places in the fence where they push their way through and spent time tracking down the owners to have them picked up. This year, I told My Honey that we need a new approach to this problem. We decided not to spend our time chasing someone else's cow around the pasture. We decided to "make friends" with them instead. At first three cows showed up in our barnyard. Later one of them had a baby, so there were four. A few weeks later, four more cows invaded our place. Now we had eight stray cows that were causing us problems. The local sheriff's department said for us to place an ad in the newspaper and if they were still unclaimed, that we would be legally allowed to sell them. After a few months, the owner FINALLY came looking for them. My Honey informed him of our "new plan" regarding the stray cow problem. Since the cows had been eating our grass, hay and feed we required the owner to buy us some feed and a salt block, which was still a pretty good deal for him considering that we'd "boarded" his cattle for two months. "Betcha" next time his cows are missing he will be more concerned about retrieving them before we "legally" sell them for our own profit.