Feeling silly

I found myself feeling silly recently.  You see, on the morning we worked the cattle, I had asked Elizabeth to send some Reiki.  Three years ago, I had gotten knocked down by a large calf that day and I was sore for weeks afterwards.  Since then I have always felt better when folks are praying, and/or sending positive energy, to us on cattle working day.

When Elizabeth wrote back asking what, "Cattle working day" means, I felt silly.  Of course, people who have never done something cannot grasp the magnitude of tasks involved in it.  All I can say to you, Eli, is that it's like our free clinic day with hundreds of things to attend to, only a lot more dangerous in that the "Clients" all weigh between 500 to 1,200 pounds. 

I decided to do a detailed post on the subject for all of my readers who have never had the "Joy" of cattle working day.  Perhaps people avoid sharing the details of this day because some parts are rather gory, but these are the facts of life for ranchers.

The first thing to do is to tie up the dogs.  Some people have taken countless hours training their dogs to work well with cattle, but nobody here has had that much time.  Past experience with these 2 has taught us that they are MOST useful when they are tied up and not running around chasing cattle in all kinds of directions.  Of course, every time that I went to the house for something, these 2 would beg mercilessly to be let off, but I knew better.

 Well, in our main herd there were 161 large animals.  Some of these were bulls or slaughter animals but most of them were mamas.  We had 120 calves out of these, revealing our high death loss this Spring in all of the mud and slop. 

We ran all of the animals (except the ones in with Sally which we did at the end) into the corralling.  This means that about 300 animals were in an area the size of a large restaurant.  This means that they are in close and anxious as they do NOT like being cooped up. 

Jerome, the children, and I started sorting off the cows while Robert fed them out in the pasture.  The trick was to keep the calves in the corral while letting everyone else out.  Have I mentioned that these animals are large with the bulls (male breeding animals) being VERY large.  Which brings me to an important point for those who seriously know NOTHING about ranching.

Bulls are the daddies of the group and I believe that we have 7 of them.  These animals are bought from breeders who specialize in breeding up the animals to their maximum potential.   Bulls can cost anywhere for $1,000 to $30,000+. Cows are the breeding mothers.  Calves are the babies that were born this Spring to the cows.  Now, bulls that have been castrated (having had their testicles removed) are called Steers and they are kept for butchering whenever we get enough orders. 

So, being we were going to work the calves, everyone else had to be sorted off.  Usually the older animals know that they are to leave and, seeing as they were hungry, they headed for the open gate.  However, being the calves are used to walking beside mama all their life, they headed there too.  Our job was to encourage all of the older animals to leave while convincing the calves that they were to stay whether they liked it or not.  Did I mention that the calves are the most jumpy of them all--ready to kick at any provocation. 

I don't have any picture of the corral when all of the animals were inside of it because I was too busy staying alive just then to take pictures.  One has to have eyes on the back of your head, or loving family members, to keep body and soul together.  Once, Cora almost got it so I yelled at her to turn around and she saved herself from an unpleasant encounter with a small group of swirling hooves. 

In this picture, we finally had all of the cows, bulls, and steers removed from the pen and were ready to begin.  It was 10:30 AM and not very warm outside. 

 Cora is our bookkeeper so she got ready to take the records.  We need to know the ear tag number of each calf; it's sex; it's color; if it has horns; and anything unusual about it that needs to be remembered for the future when the calves will either be mamas or steers for the freezer.

 Robert's cousin, Jerome, loves to work cattle so he's become a permanent part of our crew.  He gave 2 shots on his side of the shoot while I gave 1 and a goodly dose of Eucalyptus oil down the spine of each calf.  These are shots that are approved under organic standards and are NOT implants or hormones.  We eat this beef and raise it under the very highest standards.

Now, I can hear someone asking, "But how do you give a shot?"  Well, there are 2 main types of shots--subcutaneous (which means under the skin usually in the neck) or in the muscle which is usually done in the rump.



  This is a look down the alley way through the shoot as we wait for another calf.

Here Robert went back to fetch the next, "Victim."  As you can see, we have a small corral within the big corral.  We put about 20 calves in there at a time so that we don't have to go running so far all the time.

Andrew's job is to catch the calf at just the right moment.  The calf comes running, or is being pushed by Robert, into the chute with a high degree of agitation.  Andrew slams the chute shut on the calf's neck and the action begins.

As soon as Andrew has the calf caught, he puts his hand over the calf's eyes.  This calms the calf down almost instantly.  Then Jerome gave one injection from his side; I gave my one injection; Jerome had picked up his other syringe while I was giving mine and he gave his second injection; and then I dropped between 10 to 30 drops of eucalyptus oil on the calf's spine depending on how chipper he was looking.  If they came in dragging a bit, they got more, and one even got some in his nose which really gets the healing energy flowing to the bloodstream fast.

The heifer calves (the females) were finished at this point unless they had horns.  Very few of our calves have horns but about 5 of them did.  Are you ready now?  You're not eating are you?

Well, there is a handy little device that you put over the horn of the calf to de-horn the animal.  It takes a lot of muscles, so this is Robert's job.  When the man squeezes down on the horn, while squeezing the de-horner together, it cuts into the calf's head and cuts the horn off.  Of course, there is blood so you need to put the worst smelling blood stop powder on the spot where the blood vessel was attached to the horn.  This is AWFUL smelling stuff and I did it once just to quit being such a coward.  After that, either Jerome or Andrew took the bottle from me when I went over there while Robert washed the hair and blood off of the de-horner. 

Now, for what I did behind the shoot.  When the calf is a bull calf, it must be banded to keep it from breeding.  We have always banded our bull calves in the Fall of the year so that they grow to their greatest potential as full males.  However, the day of reckoning comes when the banding must be done.

Well, Robert puts his hand through the bander and reaches down around the scrotum.  He slips the large band over the scrotum making certain that both of the testicles are down in the scrotum at the time.  Jacob held the tail up tight so that there is no pain while Robert checked that there were no hairs inside the band--OUCH. 

When Robert tightened the bander, it squeezed the band tightly around the scrotum.  There was usually a little flinch then but there is not much pain involved.  You can use this same tool to band fully grown bulls, so it's not as hard on an animal to be cut with a knife and have the testicles dug out with blood everywhere like we did when I was a girl.  We all prefer this much better.

Next Jacob handed Robert the tool to cut the band off with and that was done.  I went behind Robert at the back of the shoot to make sure that none of the animals in the holding pen were coming up behind him.  I caught them at it every so often so Robert was thankful to have someone watching his backside.

Some of the calves that were born up in the pasture also needed to have ear tags put into their ears so that we can match them to their mothers and determine who is the owner before we sell them.  This was either Cora or Jacob's job.

Lastly, Andrew opened the shoot and out jumped the calf.  This was one of Jacob's with the orange tag.  He moved too fast so that I couldn't get the Orange tag but I still thought that this was a cool picture.  As you can see, all 4 feet are off the ground as he exited the chute, so it is a bit of a rodeo.  YEEHAW!



Three calves were pretty little so we knew that we'd have to do something different.  The first one we took out of the chute but he proved to be more of a handful than we had thought.  The other 2 babies, we held in the chute and did their shots quickly and then pushed them out the front--no leaping with them.

Jerome, Andrew, and Jacob have worked together so many years that they just know what to do and the feeling of camaraderie is the only grand part of the day.

Some of the bigger bull calves, feel it quite a bit as that band begins cutting off the blood supply to the scrotum.  For as long as I can remember, one of my jobs was to walk amongst the herd and see that nobody was reacting to any of the meds in combination with the banding.  Of course, now that I'm a BodyTalker, I gave everyone cortices while they were in the shoot.  Some of these more miserable steers also got short BodyTalk sessions too.  Our animals really have got it good.  :)

Well, after we finished working on the main herd, we turned all of the calves out with their mothers.  Next, we brought in the group of about 30 animals who are in with our milk cow in the small pasture here by the farm.  These are young breeding stock for next year and several cows who had too young babies to make it up to the pasture this Spring.  This was the only time that I was really nervous.

I have no idea what got into them but they were snorting and bellering and even our calm, sweet Sally started pawing the dirt.  I decided to crawl into the trough and I started doing some relaxing breathing for them all.  I started the calming Reiki too and stayed real still hoping that nobody would notice me there. 

Finally they calmed down; we sorted them off; worked the few calves in the bunch; and turned everyone out of the corral.  It was a long day and I was very stiff and sore but we had only 2 minor accidents between us 6.

Just as things quieted down, I gazed up into the Heavens to praise my God who gave us such a lovely day at the end of November in North Dakota to work our calves.  I decided to take this picture as a tribute to Him who preserved one lovely day for us.  The very next day it started snowing and it's been MUCH colder since then, but we are rejoicing that the calves are all worked for the year.



Now, we've begun insulating the shop so the guys can work out there when it's colder still.  I'm needed out there at this very moment, but I wanted to take this time to pay tribute to God who has made us organic farmer/ranchers and to the incredible people that I live with.  Oh, what a wonderful life we have!!!

Here's to you, oh God, maker of Heaven and earth!

Dawn