Resting And Standing

Please use this link to my affiliate to see the camera I use or if you have any shopping you would like to do at Amazon. If you use my link, I will get credit for channeling customers without any charge to you, I may make a small commission from the company for you doing so which I use to pay for the upkeep of this site. Thank you.

Now to the story…

Digital photos are very  cool. I take a lot of pictures, you only get to see a very small number of them on the website, there are 100’s of them on my camera at any given time. Many of them speak to me as to what kind of story will be attached to them. Boatloads of other pictures are random things that, quite frankly, I’m not sure what they are a picture of, or why I snapped that shot, much less have a story to go with them. I happened to find the inspiration to this story while flipping through those ‘unattached story’ shots in the file.

The two young bulls that have recently been weaned along with two young heifers, are now by themselves out in large bull pen with their very own barn. Since they have grown up with each other and are near to the same age, they are as close as twins but are only half-brothers. Wherever one goes, the other one is usually nearby.

This picture is actually the second one that I snapped while in the barn. I wanted to take a  backup second picture in case I wiggled too much during the first one so this one was taken a fraction of a second after the first. At the time, I mentioned how fast a critter could stand from a resting position and then when I looked at the shots on the camera realized that I see this same motion every day, but not all my readers have the chance to see the complex beauty of the most natural movements.

The first picture that was supposed to be of the two boys facing head to head as they dozed, a blissful picture and a great story.

I quickly grabbed my camera but before I could click, one of the bulls had already started to stand up. Now if I wanted to take a picture of the standing up and laying down process, I would have missed the sequence because it happened so fast. My delay of getting the peaceful pair in recline instead ended up looking rather silly but it shows the fascinating skeletal structure of their legs.

The knees on their front half bend like our human knees and their back legs bend the opposite way like our elbows. This gives them the ability to fold their front legs and back legs under them or slightly off to the side as they are in a resting position. It also gives them a steady, spring-like movement when they need to get up quickly, like when a human is getting ready to toss them a few apples or a predator has moved into the area. (Go ahead and scroll back to the earlier photo, I’ll wait…)

The speed at which this bull stood up belied the fact that he is youthful, the spring was quick and smooth. Some of the more senior cows begin to stand and spend a little time rocking before standing. They look like they are doing a small series of stretches as they rub their belly back and forth on the ground in an effort to work the kinks out while creating  enough momentum to heft their weight up to a standing position.