Kayce’s Chronicles

Trespasser is closest. He is checking out his honey. There was always a lot of work to do, dealing with the cows. And it even fell my lot to clean up after the cows – all six girls and one bull, though they were kept at the campus barn. That is a lot of work, added to full time school and my other full time work duties. Long, hard, hot, physical labor in the sweltering Maryland summer. I often had trouble keeping up and was at the barn long after ...

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(Trespasser looks on as heifer Zappa makes unfathomable choice for food over him) Trespasser was a handsome, easy going, holstein bull, about eleven months old, as I recall. Nobody seemed to think that he was going to be upset about being told his date with the heifer was over after only 5 minutes, even if he was not finished saying good-bye. However, I was a bit concerned. I did some research before commencing work, starting with CDC animal attack information. Bulls kill more people than dogs, bears, horses and sea ...

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This was a feasibility study, not a full-blown research study. A lot of the time was invested in mapping the area under the learning curve. As someone who spends most of my training time in innovation, I have learned that everything that is new takes longer than expected. Much longer. For example, the first pigs that we taught to stand while we stuck a five inch needle into the vena cava, an inch from their hearts, took about three times as long to train as the second group of pigs ...

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I travel a lot in my work with animals, and would like to share my experiences. I train and manage animals, and communicate with them. When I say communicate, I don’t mean in a psychic way, although I don’t dispute that that is possible. I mean in a tangible way, where I ask a question, which an animal answers, and which can be objectively evaluated. In other words, if I ask a heifer if she wants to go in with a bull or have a snack, and she chooses the ...

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