Kickass and Broken Tail by Bill Stokes

Attribution: T. H. Heard (engraver), Heard, T. H. (engraver, active ca. 1879) (Engraver) Harper’s magazine, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

By Bill Stokes

Kickass, the doorstop dog, reports that the keeper, ever anxious to share his vast store of rural knowledge with innocent citified friends, notes that growing up “country” means being surrounded by critters and birds that are sex possessed as part of their biological drive to reproduce.

This “breeding” being the basic purpose of successful farming, took an unusual twist the time the keeper’s father went about converting his dairy herd to beef production.

First Dad bought a young Shorthorn Herford bull to breed his Holstien cows. And though Dad built a wooden platform for the eager young bull to stand on, the bull’s short legs put him at a disadvantage with the long-legged cows, and in one of his first climactic lunges he fell over backwards and broke his tail.

This was not an uncommon occurrence in subsequent breeding action and the young bull’s tail was obviously broken more than once. It took on an unusual zig-zag appearance, but to his credit the bull was not deterred from enthusiastically doing his job with the long-legged cows.

It occurred to the keeper much later that as Dad tried to convert the home farm from dairying to beef production he might have called it the “Broken Tail Ranch.”

So ends the keeper’s note for the city kids!