By Ruth Ann Ruiz
The Post Newspaper Features Editor
How do you get bulls or cows to move from one pen to the other? It’s a matter of convincing them into lining up inside the rusted steal queue with no room for them to go anyplace but forward. Then you open a metal chute.
But what if the bull doesn’t want to go forward? If needed, you use a tool which looks like a kid’s plastic toy and give a few light taps on the bull or cow’s backside and voila, the animal moves along.
Once one animal has moved to the front of the line, it may need a little more convincing to make a turn and go into the next area. Then you quickly close the chute.
Staying on the outside of the queue is a good place for observation because it feels safe, even if the ground is muddy and covered in gushy stuff.
Glen Riske Jr., also known as Thumper by most people, has been hanging out with bulls and cows and learning their behaviors since he was a little kid. “Every weekend we’d go to East Texas and spend the night with family. I’d get up and want to go milk my uncle’s cows,” explained Thumper. He was only four years old when he was getting up with the roosters to hand milk cows.
Thumper’s a Texas City High School graduate from the class of 1995. He’s family, other than his uncle, really isn’t into farming. For example, his mom has a dance studio on 6th Street in Texas City and his dad works for the city. His great granddaddy and his grandaddy were both pharmacists in Texas City who owned their own small town drug store.
He left the humid, coastal region to play college football at Sul Ross State University. The only work he could find in the rural mountain area of Texas was working on a sheep ranch in a small town called Iraan. Time on the ranch taught him a lot about animals and about water wells. He also learned college wasn’t his cup of tea.
Next in his life’s journey, Thumper worked in management for commercial roofing while he began gathering his own herd of cows. Roofing bored him and so he started his own water well business in Santa Fe which has grown to have 13 employees and three drilling rigs.
However, his herd of cows has not bored him. “I’m always like, you have to love this ‘cause there’s not much money in it. By the time we sell our calves, we make pennies. It’s more like a hobby than a business,” explained Thumper.
Cows don’t sell for very much. According to Thumper, they turn into hamburger meet. While the calves are sold for a higher price, if they are healthy and look like they can be fattened up, calves eventually end up as nice cuts of beef. A cow’s main purpose is to produce and nurse the calves in a cow-calf operation such as what Thumper operates.
With 100 cows, he needs to keep a good number of bulls in his herd to make sure the cows provide calves.
Bulls tend to be very busy when they are let loose with a herd of cows, and they need to be in good shape to make the healthiest calves. Thumper rotates his bulls from the pastures to the farm so he can make sure they are eating well. Plus, they get a break from all their running around, which can be very tiresome.
“I rotate bulls so they’ll stay good and fat and be in good condition while they are out breeding,” shared Thumper.
His love of animals has brushed off on his daughters. His 13-year-old has 20 cows of her own. Both girls show their animals at the Galveston County Livestock Show each spring. They only give names to the ones they plan to show. The others don’t get names, they are just cows hanging out down on the farm.
The sun is hot and halfway past its noon position and the humidity is high as Thumper finishes separating the bulls and cows. There isn’t much else Thumper would rather do in his spare time. When he’s not running his water well business or enjoying time with his wife and daughters, he’s out with the cattle.
Santa Fe is known for being a livestock community but with more and more housing developments going in, it makes it harder for a cattleman to find pastureland to run cattle. Somehow Thumper has found a way to keep the tradition alive.
