Happy new year!

Hi,
Hope that you all had a good christmas and new year. It was my first day back today after the holidays - it was VERY windy and wet! In the morning, I was doing checks on all the animals, and thankfully nothing major has happened over the holidays. Some of the lookers and volunteers did checks over the holiday period, so thank you to them! Only one of the bulls, Edmund, who is the old dominant bull has had anything wrong with him. There are a number of cuts on his sides where he has obviously been fighting with some of the other bulls, though they are relatively minor and he isn't lame, but he will be monitored. I'm not sure if this means that some of the other bulls have started to challenge his dominancy or not, but it will be interesting to see if his status in the group changes.

This afternoon, I tried to keep inside due to the weather, and carried on planning my project that I'm going to carry out on the bull's aggressive behaviour. I have my data sheet ready and an ethogram, which is basically a list of behaviours that I have observed in the bulls, and will record when collecting my data. The next few weeks will be a kind of trail-run for my data collection, and I'll adjust whatever I need to, before then getting 'properly' started. Am hoping that it all works out and that I will have atleast something useful to record, though you never know when working with animals... Anyway, hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to have a trial-run with them, and I'll see what (if anything) happens...

Thanks for reading!