I hate Thistles!

Yep, well I do. The flowers are ever so pretty.

But the plant is deadly. Not in terms of poison but in terms of thorns and in terms of taking over the pasture.  So pastures have to be regularly bush hogged (meaning mowed down) two or three times a year to keep these invasive plants away.  We also have some cockleburrs that I might actually be winning the war against.  And I am winning the war against the thistles.
They get so big, some are 5 feet tall and they have multiple flowers which then bear thousands of little seeds.  Birds like the seeds and eat a lot of them and the butterflies like them, too.
They are biennial which means they sprout and grow the first year, and are large and flat type of plants, so kind of hard to find unless they are really big. The next year, they bear flowers/seeds and then die.

I spent all summer, a few minutes a week, cutting them down, spraying them and removing the flowers and seed pods.  I really went after them and saw great success. But a few got away from me so I've been thistle hunting this month.  Lots of them out there, some very tiny, but others just humongous.  I use the Kill Death Murder spray on them (so named by Jerry) and it works very, very well!  I killed off at least 70 today, I spend a half hour criss crossing the fields and find them there.  They are just nasty, thorned things!