Ox horn care

I used to show purebred Ayrshires when I was a kid. An old timer and friend I showed against would train a yoke of yearling heifers almost every year for exhibition purposes at the fairs he attended. He used to shine their horns up with fine grit sandpaper when they started getting dull and flaky.

Ha!
I knew I read this somewhere!

I use Ivermectin on my cattle and I have been pleased with the results. It controls intestinal parasites and also most of the external ones like lice etc. I think it is the scratching and rubbing of the poll on things that causes the severe flaking of the horns, they are just responding to the itching from the pests. Timing can be an issue with certain pests so for young cattle I would do it at Thanksgiving and then again in the spring just before starting to turn them out to pasture. I don’t fuss over their horns much, but I will occasionally use a quarter round file to smooth the roughest parts including any flaking that might occur. Both Will and Abe have lost horns over the years from various things and I have cleaned them up first by light filing, then by sanding with a medium sand paper, then fine sand paper then steel wool. Then I used car wax to shine them up. They look really good, I wish they were still on their head.

I learned from Howie to gently scrape flakey or yellowed dull horns with a piece of broken glass from head outward. You don’t want to take off too much shell. Use medium fine sandpaper after. Coat with olive oil, veg. oil or lard.

I usually scrub my oxen’s horns in summer weekly with shampoo on scrub brush, rinse well, coat with oil. I like to keep the stains off the white horns and I think they like the scrubbing at the base; keeps flakes and dandruff from building up. I keep the hair trimmed back in summer too.

The wet weather seems to have a direct correlation to the flakiness of my horns as well, it has been dry for a little while and they seem to have at least stayed the same instead of getting worse. I was using hoof dressing on mine but have cut back to using it every once in a while and only when dry, the combo of wet and hoof dressing seemed to make the horns even worse.