Heading down to check the stock tanks this morning, I stopped for quite a while to watch a lone antelope buck. He stopped to watch me too. The new heifers were all down by the windmill, getting a drink, licking the salt blocks and eating some mineral. They were keeping and eye on me while I kept an eye on the antelope who was getting closer to the one-wire fence dividing two of the paddocks.

Finally, he ducked under the wire-too lazy to jump over I guess, and trotted off into the stubble. I climbed over the new corral panels to put the windmill in gear and just generally check to be sure everything was as it should be. The heifers contented to keep a wary eye on me, not yet used to this new routine. But I know, soon enough, they’ll be expecting me and waiting for those cotton cake pellets I call “cotton candy.”

Once they decide we aren’t trying to hurt them and that those pellets are good, it is hard to keep them from storming us when we come into the pasture with a bucket. It’s our way of pulling a “Crocodile Dundee” and taming the beasts. When we need to work them, they are much calmer from the handling.

It’s the same with people. We are much less skittish when change comes, if we’re handled a bit more gently to start with. I love this verse from James, and I think it applies as we work with our “beasts,” be they cattle, horses, dogs, cats, or gerbils.

James 3:17 

But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere.