A short essay on animals and cyclists

This morning I woke up and hit the road on the bicycle for an hour and a half. Same loop I have been doing out Gooch Hill road and coming back on Cottonwood. 20 miles plus or minus depending on how you connect the two roads. Today I was cruising along in ipod-land and was shaken out of my reverie by a barking dog blasting towards me at high speed from a mobile home next to the road. I started yelling at it and pedaling like mad and fortunately he stopped chasing me in short order. Very stimulating though... Then two more ranch dogs were charging across a pasture at me not too far down the road, but a good "NO! GO HOME!" got them squared away. Ranch dogs are trained to herd things, and I am sure they think I am some wierd type of cow moving quickly down the road, obviously escaped from the fence. Livestock also get confused by the me on a bike. One day a herd of cattle started running towards the road as I went by. I don't know what they thought, maybe I had food or something. Then in the same pasture a different day there were yearling cows, younger, and they all ran away when they saw me. Wierd. Today some horses got startled and started running away, until I spoke to them whereby they stopped, realizing I was a human being.