How to Halter Train Your House Cow

Our house cow, Marmalade, is due to have her first calf in a couple of weeks.

Because we want to milk her we need to be able to lead her into the milking shed. She was hand raised on a bottle so she is fairly quiet, but for the last few months she has been running with the other cows, so she was a little bit wary of us when we first brought her back up to the house.

Here she is as a baby. We collected her and brought her home in the back of my car! She was soooo cute!

 When we first brought Marmalade back up to the house we started off by giving her hay at the same time twice each day. Then we gradually introduced her to oats in a bucket. While she was eating each time, Danny, who is particularly fond of her, would spend lots of time with her, getting her used to being around people again. Gradually she would let him pat her and give her a good rub.

The next step was getting a halter on her. The halter we use is an adjustable rope halter.

When Marmalade had her head buried in the bucket of oats, we wrapped the lead end of the halter around her neck, then carefully put the halter on her properly. She was usually so busy eating, she wouldn’t really notice what we were doing.Once we had been doing this step for a week or so, and she was used to having the halter on for short periods of time, we gradually increased the amount of time it was on for.

The chooks are never very far away – always hopeful for some spilled oats.

Then we started leading her around.  At first she would pull against us, or try and run off – but if we carried a bucket with us, she was never any trouble.  House cows are always ruled by their stomachs – she was always hoping we had oats in the bucket!Here I am. I’ve led her out of her paddock and am about to lead her into the milking barn. Danny has filled up a little trough we have in the barn with oats so when I get her in there she has a reward waiting for her. The first few times we just let her stand and eat in the barn and then when she was used to that we would hold her head in the bale.

The bale is just a bit of wood that drops down next to her neck, decreasing the space she as, thus “catching her”. She actually wasn’t worried at all about this, so long as she has oats to munch on, she’s happy! As I said, milking cows are ruled by their stomachs! This is where she’ll stand to be milked.

We’ll feed her all her oats in the bale from now on, so she learns that if she wants oats she’ll have to stand in the bale.

She was quite easy to train really. It definitely helped that she was handled a lot as a calf.

We’re so excited for her to have her own calf. We haven’t had our own home-produced milk for nearly three years, so it will be great to have lovely fresh milk again! I’m looking forward to getting stuck into making yoghurt and cheese too!