Here’s another good lesson from my work with the folks in British Columbia this summer.  Cows understand what you’re saying with your body, even when you think you’re saying nothing at all.

I was working with the Cariboo Chilcotin Coast Invasive Plant Committee on coaching programs and presentations.  One of my partner ranchers, Wendy Braim,  wanted to train some cow calf pairs to eat spotted knapweed.  The pasture she was working in had some of that weed, and some good stands of Canada thistle as well.  Spotted knapweed was one of the first weeds I trained cows to eat, and all the cows I’ve trained since have shown me it’s one of their favorite foods.  So, I put together a training plan for my BC Rancher and then waited to hear back about her success.

But the call I got wasn’t what I expected.  

Wendy was kind of down in the dumps because she said her cows weren’t eating the target weed.  As we talked more, I realized that she didn’t believe that spotted knapweed was a good forage for her cows and that we were trying to trick them into eating something that wasn’t good for them.

I told her it was likely her worries were the problem.  The cows read her body language and they knew she thought she was feeding them something bad.  I reminded her that spotted knapweed is equal to alfalfa in nutritional value, and that the cows would do really well on it.  To help her and the cows, we took a step back, and fed them some foods she believed were nutritious.  Since I was headed that way for a presentation, I told her I’d come by and we’d feed weeds together.

This is the fastest I've seen cows learn to eat thistle. Right after tasting it in the tubs, they headed straight to this thistle patch!

On site, it took a matter of minutes before the cows were eating the spotted knapweed we gathered for them. Just for fun, we went ahead and introduced them to Canada thistle.  We were all tickled when the herd headed straight to the thistle patch right after eating thistles from the tubs.

The change was nothing more than helping Wendy have a little more confidence that she was doing the right thing.  Her animals trusted her, and they went ahead and ate weeds.  They even trusted her enough that when we brought a whole herd of people to see them, they showed them how they’d learned to eat spotted knapweed.