Posted on 12/14/2004 2:32:45 PM PST by Tarpaulin
In Texas, there are county roads that have cattle guards and you KNOW there may be cattle in the road. This guy needs all they throw at him. We hit an angus cow one night that had gotten out of the pasture she was in. Had just told hubby that the cows were in this area. He said "no they are farther on..." blam! No moon, black highway and black cow.
I'm amazed, but I have never hit a cown in all my years of driving open range. A real good friend of mine totalled a brand spanking new Camry on a full size hog on the road. The car almost completely wrapped around the pig, and the pig survived (but had to be put down and made into bacon).
LOL!!
I think this cow did survive too. At least for a while. She limped (actually her whole right back end was no good) to the side of the road and our 1974 Ford station wagon (whoo hoo) was sqooshed in on the right front side. There was a lot of cows on that road. We're lucky that she was the only one in the road.
I see some well-deserved jail time in this guy's future. A one-time accident might be different, with a civil suit instead of criminal charges, but the guy has a history of not maintaining his fences and bragged about it to a cop.
A friend of mine, (now deceased) plowed into a herd of cows that had gotten away from a sale barn one night. He killed seven of them, and his pickup looked like a bomb had gone off inside it. The radiator was mashed onto the engine, and the cab was sheared off level with the dashboard. The driver didn't get a scratch.
I was in a car that hit a horse one late night. That was scary. The horse very nearly came through the windshield. The worst part was that the collision didn't kill the horse, and the cops had to shoot it.
I too thought the same way,another anti-farmer article.Hard work keeping up fences.Some farmers don`t.Some get by somehow.An Angus is hard to see at night.
Sad story.
"I'd hate to think what a horse would do."
Years ago I hit 2 arabian horses one night in San Marcos, CA. Killed one and injured the other one so bad that they had to lay it down.
The horse owner was livid screaming that I owed him $20k for his 2 horses but it wasn't open range area and he had to repair my truck and the cost of disposing of his 2 dead horses!
Rancher never found a dead or injured steer.
Is it open range there?
BTTT!!!!!!
If they get the right lawyer, they may well be the proud new owners of a cattle ranch. Hopefully, the first thing they'll do is to put up a fence.
A few points to ponder.
1. UDOT plans for highway development in the area apparently included putting up a fence--or at least supplying fencing materials for the local ranchers to put up a fence. This indicates that it was at least partially UDOT's responsibility to fence in this area.
2. What the rancher may have said to the officer is probably taken out of context. If he were trying to console himself over the loss of an animal and just did it out loud by saying what he said, the officer may have mis-interpreted it or only heard part of what he was saying.
3. None other than Darrell Kunzler himself has been in UDOT planning commission meetings trying to get them to fence along that very highway, which indicates that he may have had no legal right to erect a fence along the UDOT right-of-way. Based on what he has said and has been noted in these meetings, Kunzler has been very concerned about cows on the highway. Furthermore, UDOT removed a metal cattle guard from the area and replaced it with a painted one (cows must be actually trained to NOT cross a painted cattle gaurd). I don't know, but this may have had an effect on whether or not the steer was where he was.
4. I know for a FACT that SOME law enforcement officers and MOST of the press outright lie about situations. If law enforcement were blaming him for something that he had no control over and if they were tired of responding to calls about his cattle, they may cook up charges to get rid of him. It has been known to happen in rural Utah fairly often (I know, I live in rural Utah and personally know several people that have been framed and have had attempted framings by crooked law enforcement--members of my own family have been targeted no fewer than three seperate occasions, all of which charges were dropped and at least one of which ended with a reprimand for the arresting officer).
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