You Can Lead a Bull to Water, But You Can't Stop Him From Breaking the Water Trough

From about July - December, we kept our bull, Chuck, and our little buckling, Buckwheat, in a fenced off area that we call the "bullpen."  We wanted to keep the boys away from the girls, if you know what I mean.  Now is the time that we'd like Chuck to breed Daisy, Rosie, and Clarabelle, but Luna is too young to be bred.  So in order to effectively manage this, we put Luna in the bullpen and simply allow the bull to have access to both cows and heifer that we want bred.  We've seen some activity, but are unsure if breeding was successful.  We should know shortly.

One bad things about bulls is that they love to rub their heads.  They rub their heads on posts, on people, and on any other object they can find.  Unfortunately, they can be very rough and destructive to your property (or your body).  Take for instance the photo below.  This mud hole looks like pigs would be running around in it, but we have no pigs.  What we do have is a bull that rubbed the water trough with his head until he broke the bucket.  I placed one bucket nested in another one and the bull broke that one too.

Water would leak out and create a big mess that never dried up.  This is a management problem as it is a perfect breeding ground for parasites.  I don't want Luna standing in all that muck to drink water.

The bull broke the bucket and made a huge mess

So I went to the feed store and picked out a 50 gallon fiberglass water trough made by Rubbermade.  I think it set me back about $69 bucks.  That's okay, though.  It appears to be tough and durable and this spring when we put the bull back in the bullpen, he won't be able to break this one with his head.

Right now I'm supplying the water by water hose.  The hose runs about 70 feed from a spigot at the barn.  My plans are to run some pvc pipe underground to supply the new trough with water.  I will als put a float valve in it to keep this trough automatically filled up.  As you can also see, I've moved the new water trough out of the mud hole.  The trough is short enough where the goats should have no problem drinking from it.  This should make all the animals happy - except the bull, of course.

Curious Luna came down the chute wondering what we were doing.  She was sloshing through the mud and the muck.  I felt sorry for her.

While we were at the feed store, we picked up a salt/mineral block for Luna to lick on. I think it costed $6.99.  Luna promptly went and began licking on it.  Her pinkish colored nose from licking it made her look funny!  I placed the lick in a flat tub with plenty of holes drilled in it to allow rainwater to flow out of the tub.

Salt Lick

Luna of course can't speak English, so we are not sure what she is trying to tell us, but because I have some hearing problems due to not wearing ear protection, I am pretty good at reading lips.  I am pretty sure by reading her lips, that Luna is expressing her thankfulness for her new water trough and salt lick.  Her face was all pinkish color, letting me know that she had found the salt/mineral lick.  I licked it just to see what it tasted like.  Pretty salty... No wonder she's at the water trough now.

Your welcome, Luna.  Now if I could just keep that bull from destroying everything he comes into contact with.