I had to deal with this cow of a client today...

I think that there is an relative, on this board!

> I think that there is an relative, on this board!

:good: :angel:

I word of warning when it comes to cows (retarded bovines) and survey flagging.

We had to pay a farmer $400 in vet bills once to clear out the stomach of his cows. Apparently, they eat it all, and it gets all wrapped up inside them and they can't digest it.

Solution?
Short pieces of flagging, or just painting the lath.

> I word of warning when it comes to cows (retarded bovines) and survey flagging.
>
> We had to pay a farmer $400 in vet bills once to clear out the stomach of his cows. Apparently, they eat it all, and it gets all wrapped up inside them and they can't digest it.
>
> Solution?
> Short pieces of flagging, or just painting the lath.

I appreciate the heads up. They weren't too long, but I guess that's a relative thing.

Did you get her phone number for me? Such lovely blue eyes!

Definitely a serious issue with cows. Baling twine is a common thing found in guts along with black pvc pipe they chew at times.
We once had an attempt to sue for damaging a horse on a stake.
I am always cautious of what i leave in farmers paddocks. Steel bars and spikes in the ground can play havoc with expensive tyres also.

Cows would have to be the worst animals when surveying.
They'll chew the rubber strips off your vehicle along with the side mirrors.

The fun of rural surveying.

Holy Cow!

What a bunch of BULL!

🙂

N

Yup, when staking p/l routes across cow pastures we us short stakes and paint, no flagging.

Holy Cow!

Cows will go after most anything. Had a project in Oklahoma many years ago setting out aerial photo targets. We used 24" wide unbleached muslin to make the big ole "X". We placed 90 such targets for the control point. Pilots flew the project 2 days later. When we processed the film we could only see 24 targets and a bunch of fat cows.:-O

Aerial targets in Oklahoma

I've used butcher paper weighted down with rocks. The cows don't seem to like the "crunch" of the paper if they walk on it. But the wind can play hell with a 12' long piece of paper.

My fav (for low altitude flights usually) is an old tire painted white. They show up as a perfect white circle.

Of course for township corners and such we use larger tractor tires..:pinch:

Holy Cow!

We were doing a large MODOT project years ago and had similar troubles w cattle. An old ranch hand suggested we overlay the panels w hardware cloth. He said they hated the feel on their snout. Sure thing, it worked every time. Since we always had to retrieve the targets after the flights we just reused the hardware cloth over and over... never lost another due to cattle.

Yep. We had to buy a cow several years ago. We were staking proposed right-of-way through a rural area of GA and part of it went through a farm with lots of cattle. One of them ate the flagging off of every stake on that farm. It died. We paid.

Did you at least get some steaks out of the deal?

Holy Cow!

The solution we found was to take a LARGE cooler to the targets. In the cooler were MANY brewskies. If you pee on the muslin, the cows leave it alone. The boat ride back to the truck was a thrill a minute as was the drive back to the motel. The nice man with the badge and gun and those pretty blue lights did not buy our cow whiz story however.

Holy Cow!

Ah, photogrammetric jokes.

Funny, though.

😀

Holy Cow!

We were staking some points in field with a donkey. The wind blew off my hat which rolled a couple of hundred feet, so I let it lay until I was finished with the job.

When I went to get the hat it was gone. I looked a few hundred feet and the donkey was staring at me while chewing on the hat. I chased that dude all over the pasture to retrieve the hat. Finally I got my BB gun from the truck and popped him in the rear and he let it go, but the hat was a goner.

At least it was a COW!

Aerial targets in Oklahoma

> I've used butcher paper weighted down with rocks.
The fellows I worked with in OK favored using strips of sheetrock for aerial targets.

At least it was a COW!

As a former ranch boy who saw cows eat MOST everything with no ill affects, and as a long time land surveyor who heard from numerous land owners not to leave flagging for their cows to eat as they all had cows die from eating it, I must say I never witnessed it. I have witnessed them eating black poly pipe from the ranchers own irrigation/water lines, but never came back the next day to find a carcass on the ground.

I've used regular plastic roll flagging for hundreds of targets in the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, Colorado and Idaho for aerial panels, for many of which it was a constant battle to keep the cattle from destroying prior to the aerial flight. Not to count untold numbers of stakes and lathes marking various points, wrapped with flagging. Again never saw a "tits up" critter around any of them.

Think most flagging manufactures will say that the chance of a critter being harmed is also not possible.

Not saying it can't happen but before I bought the cow, I would want to have it autopsied even if I had to pay for it. Think most instances of a dead cow may be a land owner/stock grower seeing opportunity flash before his eyes, and hauling OLD "Bessie" over to a nearby stake, where she may even suffer from a lightning strike or lead posioning!