When the buffaloes have become very weak from struggling, a lot of men rush up and tie a stout rope around the neck of each buffalo. The rope has two ends, one on each side of the buffalo, and each end is quite long.
A dozen men haul at the rope, and the buffalo has to get up and march with them. In this way the men bring the buffaloes one by one to the village.
How do the men tame the buffaloes? That is quite easy, if they already have a few tame buffaloes which they may have caught and tamed some time before. And as the people have been doing this for many, many years, they always have some tame buffaloes. So this is the way the men treat the wild buffaloes:
Wild Buffaloes Tamed Quickly by Kindness
They put the wild buffaloes and the tame ones together in a pen, or corral. Inside the corral there is a pond. In the deep part of the pond there is plenty of good water to drink; and in the shallow part of the pond there is plenty of mud in which the buffaloes may roll about and wallow.
The men keep the buffaloes there together for many days, the wild ones and the tame ones. Every day the men throw into the corral plenty of fresh grass, which the buffaloes can eat all day.
Now, what more could the wild buffaloes want? They could not be treated any better! They have plenty to eat, plenty to drink, and plenty of mud in which to wallow. The tame buffaloes soon make friends with them, and talk to them in their own language.
"You will not be any better off in the jungle," the tame ones say to the wild ones. "Here you do not have to walk about all day to get enough to eat, and then walk a good way to find water to drink, or a place in which to wallow. And, also, we have no fear of tigers here. What more do you want?"
So in a few weeks the wild ones become quite tame. Still, even after that, the old and the new ones are always kept together, and soon they become like one herd.
Afterwards, when the farmers use them for plowing, they always hitch to the plow one buffalo that has been tame for a long time, and one that is newly-tamed. Then it becomes easy for the new one to learn the work by just doing as his friend does.