Buttonhooks are handy tools.  Yesterday, my old cow Gert (Gert is the brown cow in the photo below) got a piece of wire wrapped around her hoof.  I’m not sure when or how this wire ended up in the pasture, but it must have been some time ago.  The wire ran around her ankle twice, went under the wraps and down between her toes, under the hoof and up the back of the hoof, looping again through the wire around the ankle.  I was amazed it could get that way on its own, and it was not going to come off easily.  My squeeze chute is currently at its other home, so I had to crowd the cows into a pen, and get Gert locked in an alley.  Of course the leg with the wire was on the inside of the alley, and I had to get down on the ground and work from under the fence boards.  After she got tired of kicking each time I touched her hoof, I was able to work the wire loose, and unwrap it with the buttonhook.