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Northeast Iowa | It may be a combination of genetics and environment. If the genetic tendency to be flighty exists, you are more likely to see it displayed when the situation arises. We bought a group of about 20 Hereford cows in the mid-70's. The truck door was opened up as we unloaded them at the chute and two of them took off like a rocket for the far end of the cornstalk field. The rest of the group followed behind, barely keeping up. Those two individuals remained flighty the whole time they were here. The balance of the group was nothing special on either side of calm -- they weren't wild, but they weren't the type you walked up to any time you wanted. This was a whole-herd acquisition, so it wasn't the bottom 20 wild ones out of 200 regular cows.
Some sires are more prone to have flighty offspring. I've had experience with a lot of EXT progeny and grand-progeny over the years and didn't have any issues with them being flighty. In the same years, I had some Beefmaker (Simmental) progeny that you wanted to give a wide berth to when working them, and you didn't want to run them into the Bud Box / tub by themselves.
Maybe that's a difference in flight zone genetics. Everyone is calm when they are in a group and you are 160 feet away, but if you close that to 30 feet, some of them are at the opposite side of the group than you are, or they are the ones leading the escape.
I haven't seen any clear indication on maternal protective distance. Some cows won't let you near the calf the day of birth, but may have no problem on Day 3. Some will be aggressive from the time the calf hits the ground until it's 30 days old or more. That tends to be a mother-daughter-granddaughter line more so than a sire-influenced situation. That's why I started putting the dam's tag number on ear tags instead of just the calf ID. You tend to notice trends when the same numbers are visible when it's a difficult situation. If #3325 had me look for an exit, and she was out of #1127 who did the same, I think the calves from both of them will go on feed no matter how good they look as heifer candidates. The same thing happened with pinkeye a few years ago. The cows and calves I treated were all mother-daughter-granddaughters and their calves when I looked at tags as I treated them. I sold them all that fall and haven't had to treat any pinkeye since.
We used to have a trucker who would come out to load and walk down the chute from the trailer whooping and hollering before he was even in the shed. Then he'd wonder why his load took longer than the others to get on the truck. Same thing happens with different staff helping work cattle. The ones who bang sorting sticks against the tub and the alley end up taking longer to work a group than what I can do myself when I work alone and don't say a word.
You can't measure flighty nature like you can milk production, weaning weight or rate of gain. Put them in a bell-shaped curve and decide how much of one side of the bell or the other you want to remove. I have less tolerance for attitude toward the back end of my career than I did when I was at the front end.
https://www.grandin.com/references/cattle.during.handling.html
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Flightiness
