Working Cattle

The sortation of the cows and calves

Hope's new ear tag

     Hey there! I just found this draft and realized I never posted it... oh dear. This isn't exactly new news, but it might be interesting so here ya go. ;) 

4/24/14

     Greetings and Salutations! To anyone reading this, congratulations! You weren't gusted off the face of the planet this past week, and that's quite an accomplishment. It's calmed down a whale of a lot here, and we even got a half inch of rain a few days ago! Yay God!
     My real purpose of this post, though, is to tell you that we worked cows last week, and explain our process.
     The first thing we did was run all the cattle up into the corrals and sort the cows from the calves. We ran the cows up the lane and gave them a shot for respiratory and reproductive diseases. Sherrill and Hope had lost their identification tags so we 're-installed' them while we were at it.

A horn bump on Radagast

     Once the cows were all done (and lunch was eaten) we stared on the calves! Farm Boy pushed calves up the lane and into the squeeze-chute where we caught the heads in the head catcher. Dad gave them two shots, one for diarrhea and one for respiratory viruses. Then Farm Boy would feel for horns, something we haven't done in at least ten years due to our lack of a hereford bull. That's one of the best jobs because it entails rubbing all the adorable fuzzy heads. C: If the calf had horn bumps, Dad dehorned them with the appropriately named dehorner. It doesn't actually remove the horns, but stops them from growing more. After that, the calf was done! We'd let them out into one of two pens depending on what pasture they went to, and move on to the next calf.
     Everything went smoothly, for which we were very grateful!