Climate Change and Cows vs Climate Change and Nukes . . . by JLW

The Magical Welsh White Cow - immortalized ancestor of the polled British White Cattle of today

The Magical Welsh White Cow . . . . .

"Llyn Barfog is the scene of the famous elfin cow's descent upon earth, from among the droves of the Gwragedd Annwn. This is the legend of the origin of the Welsh black cattle, as related to me in Carmarthenshire:

In times of old there was a band of elfin ladies who used to haunt the neighborhood of Llyn Barfog, a lake among the hills just back of Aberdovey. It was their habit to make their appearance at dusk clad all in green, accompanied by their milk-white hounds. Besides their hounds, the green ladies of Llyn Barfog were peculiar in the possession of droves of beautiful milk-white kine, called Gwartheg y Llyn, or kine of the lake.

One day an old farmer, who lived near Dyssyrnant, had the good luck to catch one of these mystic cows, which had fallen in love with the cattle of his herd. From that day the farmer's fortune was made. Such calves, such milk, such butter and cheese, as came from the milk-white cow never had been seen in Wales before, nor ever will be seen again. The fame of the Fuwch Gyfeiliorn (which was what they called the cow) spread through the country round.  

The farmer, who had been poor, became rich; the owner of vast herds, like the patriarchs of old. But one day he took it into his silly noddle that the elfin cow was getting old, and that he had better fatten her for the market. His nefarious purpose thrived amazingly. Never, since beef steaks were invented, was seen such a fat cow as this cow grew to be!

Killing day came, and the neighbors arrived from all about to witness the taking-off of this monstrously fat beast. The farmer had already counted up the gains from the sale of her, and the butcher had bared his red right arm.

The cow was tethered, regardless of her mournful lowing and her pleading eyes; the butcher raised his bludgeon and struck fair and hard between the eyes; when lo ! a shriek resounded through the air, awakening the echoes of the hills, as the butcher's bludgeon went through the goblin head of the elfin cow, and knocked over nine adjoining men, while the butcher himself went frantically whirling around trying to catch hold of something permanent.

Then the astonished assemblage beheld a green lady standing on a crag high up over the lake, and crying with a loud voice:

Dere di felen Emion,
Cyrn Cyfeiliorn-braith y Llyn,
A'r foci Dodin,
Codwch, dewch adre.

Come yellow Anvil, stray horns, 
Speckled one of the lake, 
And of the hornless Dodlin, 
Arise, come home.

Whereupon not only did the elfin cow arise and go home, but all her progeny to the third and fourth generations went home with her, disappearing in the air over the hill tops and returning nevermore. Only one cow remained of all the farmer's herds, and she had turned from milky white to raven black.

Whereupon the farmer in despair drowned himself in the lake of the green ladies, and the black cow became the progenitor of the existing race of Welsh black cattle." Source: Sacred Texts

NOTE:  This ancient story has long been a part of my primary web site.  However, Orcsweb has dropped support of frontpage extensions . . . and I have to rebuild the site, worried I'll lose some of the things I like most, and this old story is one of them.  

Gotta Love the Texas Rains! Unless you are a Global Warming Goober of Course . . .

The welcome and wet and thunderous rains that have so been welcomed by Texans are simply another angle for climate change/global warming fools.  Just like the drought years, now our rainy years, and no, it's not like parts of East Texas did not see wonderful life giving rains last year as well, etc....
But, this Spring, the awesome rains are rather all over our Great State, and it's garnered mainstream media mindless meanderings of monstrous mammals maiming the magnificence of Mother Earth . . .

Go figure . . . 

Oops!  The very ancient polled British White Cattle must be partly responsible right?  They've been
around for thousands of years, shame on them!  My herd must have brought the drought years to
upper Southeast Texas and now, thankfully, they've brought all the grand rain!!  Sounds like a win win :).

Climate Change May Have Souped Up Record-Breaking Texas Deluge

Deadly downpours flooded Texas and Oklahoma and may have been exacerbated by global warming

By Elizabeth Harball, Scott Detrow and ClimateWire | May 27, 2015

Large swaths of Houston were underwater yesterday after more than 10 inches of rain fell on the city during a 24-hour window.

The bulk of the rain came during intense Monday night thunderstorms, bringing America’s fourth-largest city to a standstill by yesterday morning. Major highways were flooded, schools and mass transit systems were shut down, rivers were swollen above flood stage, and the city’s Emergency Operations Center had declared a Level 1 emergency for the first time since Hurricane Ike struck in 2008. Houston Mayor Annise Parker proclaimed a state of disaster for the city yesterday afternoon.

Austin, San Antonio and several other central Texas communities also faced severe flooding over the weekend after several days of intense rain. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) described flooding along the Blanco River between Wimberley and San Marcos as a “tsunami-style” flood.

“This huge tidal wave of water just completely wiped out neighborhoods,” he said yesterday. Abbott has now declared a state of disaster in 46 counties or, as he put it, “literally from the Red River to the Rio Grande.”

Even before the worst of the Houston flooding, Abbott characterized the flooding as “absolutely massive.”

“This is the biggest flood this area of Texas has ever seen,” he said Monday. At least 17 people are dead in Texas and neighboring Oklahoma, according to the Associated Press, with dozens more still missing.

Speaking at the White House yesterday, President Obama pledged federal support for what he called “devastating, record-breaking floods.” He noted that Federal Emergency Management Agency personnel had already been deployed to Texas.

A state of emergency was declared for 44 Oklahoma counties as of Monday evening, and yesterday Obama made federal disaster aid available in the state. The National Weather Service on Sunday reported a record for total monthly rainfall set at Oklahoma City’s Will Rogers World Airport at 18.19 inches, shattering the previous record of 14.66 inches set in June of 1989.

‘It looked like a river’
The National Weather Service also reported that multiple daily maximum precipitation records were broken in a number of Texas cities over the long weekend. As of yesterday morning, the agency had recorded over 10 inches of rain in multiple locations in Harris County, where Houston is located, as well as in neighboring Fort Bend County.

Nicole Buergers, 34, a marketing manager at a Houston Internet marketing company, was on a date with her boyfriend Monday evening when they were temporarily stranded in a coffee shop in the Montrose neighborhood amid the downpour.

“The water really rose very quickly, and [we] were trapped,” Buergers said yesterday morning. “There were people coming in off the street—everyone was huddled in the coffee shop.”

Buergers was eventually driven home by another customer. She and many other Houston residents were homebound yesterday, unable to travel to their offices due to flooded streets and highways.

Houston resident David Musso, 35, shared a photo on Twitter yesterday morning of floodwaters covering the intersection of Waugh Drive and Memorial Drive, which he usually passes on the commute to his marketing job.

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“It looked like a river,” Musso said in an interview.

The Red Cross has opened 30 shelters in Texas and Oklahoma as flooding has increased in recent weeks. The organization said more than 200 people spent the night in its shelters over the weekend.

The holiday weekend deluge peaked an unusually wet May for the Lone Star State. The current situation is in stark contrast to conditions seen in Texas just one year ago, when drought blanketed over 70 percent of the state, with nearly a third of it falling under the U.S. Drought Monitor’s “extreme” category or worse, according to records kept by the National Drought Mitigation Center. On May 14, the Drought Center reported that “exceptional drought” had completely dissipated from Texas and Oklahoma for the first time since July 2012.

A climate change link?
As is often the case when extreme weather hits these days, talk turned to whether climate change played a role.

Brenda Ekwurzel, a senior climate scientist at the science advocacy group the Union of Concerned Scientists, said she believes global warming likely contributed to the extreme conditions. Ekwurzel noted that the combination of a burgeoning El Niño and record-breaking ocean surface temperatures in April likely “revs up the hydrological cycle” in the region.

Ekwurzel added, “When you have a warmer atmosphere, then you have the capability to hold more water vapor. When storms organize, there’s much more water you can wring out of the atmosphere compared to the past.”

In a Facebook post Sunday, high-profile climate researcher Katharine Hayhoe, director of Texas Tech University’s Climate Science Center, stated that “climate change will affect us in the ways we’re already vulnerable to climate and weather today, and Texas is no exception.”

While extreme weather events like droughts and floods occur naturally in Texas, precipitation in the state is becoming more variable, making droughts more potent and increasing the risk of heavy rainfall and flooding, Hayhoe said.

“Science does not say that climate change is CAUSING the extreme rain and drought we’re seeing across the U.S. today, and in recent years,” she said. “Just like steroids make a baseball player stronger, climate change EXACERBATES many of our weather extremes, making many of them, on average, worse than they would have been naturally.”

Rain remains in the forecast for portions of central Texas this week. The National Weather Service has issued a hazardous weather outlook warning of scattered thunderstorms that “may reach strong to severe levels, with flash flooding from heavy rainfall.”

Still, Houston Mayor Parker sees the weather as a positive development. “We believe we’re going to get a break from the weather,” she said yesterday. “If you look at the radar right now, it’s sort of the typical summer weather pattern with brief pop-up thunderstorms. If we can avoid any significant precipitation for the next 24 to 48 hours, the bayous should be completely back in their banks.”

Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from Environment & Energy Publishing, LLC. www.eenews.net, 202-628-6500

Cattle Handling Points

What follows is an excerpt from a great article on cattle handling from Texas Agrilife Extension. You can find the full text of the article HERE and it is certainly well worth the read.

"There are five basic principles of cattle behavior that when used properly can improve the ease and speed of working cattle while reducing stress and increasing efficiency. Those principles are: 

1. Cattle want to see you.
Understanding how cattle see is basic to getting cattle to respond to your position. Cattle can see everywhere but directly behind them or a small blind spot in front of them. When working from behind, it is important to keep moving side to side to prevent cattle from turning in an effort to keep you in their line of sight. 

2. Cattle want to go around you.
This allows you to position yourself such that, when they do go around you, they are pointed directly at the gate or destination you had in mind. They’ll think it was their idea to go there! 

3. Cattle want to be with and will go to other cattle.
A herding instinct is natural among ‘prey’ animals. As stockmen we can take advantage of this natural instinct as we work from the front of cattle. If you start the front the back will follow. 

4. Cattle want to return to where they have been.
The natural instinct of a cow is to return to the last safe or comfortable place they were. The simple principle of the return box or “Bud Box” helps capture and use this principle. It also works great in sorting and moving cattle from one corral to another. 

5. Cattle can only process one main thought at a time.
If cattle are thinking about anything other than what you are asking them to do you will need to change their mind first before putting pressure on them.

There are three basic means of communicating with livestock. Very simply they are:

􀁸 Sight
􀁸 Sound
􀁸 Touch

Cattle prefer to communicate through line of sight. Sound coming from a human for the most part is stressful and marginally successful in getting the desired result. Sound should be used as a secondary method and only used when sight is not adequate. Sound can often lead to distracting the line of sight away from the desired direction. Touch is really only useful in situations where animals are confined and additional stimulus is needed to get cattle to move or respond. Touch does not refer to use of driving aids such as hotshots or sorting sticks or paddles.

British White Cows & Heifers for Sale

British White Cattle for Sale in Colmesneil, Texas

J.West Cattle Company now has a selection of British White Cattle for sale ranging in age from weanlings to older bred cows that have several more good breeding years to add to add fine stock to your herd.  Here are photos of a few of the bred cows available now.

DAR'lin Lil Diamond

J.West's Maude Rae

J.West's Nova

J.West's Olivia

J.West's Birdie

  Please visit www.TexasBritishWhiteCattle.com for additional information.........