Sunday, June 6, 2010

Working on Cattle

Each weekend that I go home to the farm all my city friends ask what I do out there. When I tell them that I work on cattle, they look at me with a puzzled look on their face.

I thought it would be easier to show what I do rather then just writing about it. So here it is. This is a portion of "working on cattle"

Once I have an animal that is quiet enough to lead and is used to having the halter on them we will start to work on the animals hair and getting them quiet and used to humans.
We start by getting them tied up. They start looking like this.

We then use a regular old garden hose and a pressure nozzle like this one to get the animal wet.

They don't always like this, but it is a really good way to quiet cattle down. We get their whole body wet. Legs, tail, head, belly, everywhere but their ears.

Next we take a brush and brush all of the hair down. This gets any kinks out of the hair.The next step is to brush it all forward. You always brush from their tail to their head.Next we use this machine called a blower. It is a super powered hair dryer for animals.We blow the hair forward the same way as we just combed the hair. You need to make sure you get all of the water out, and that the skin is dry.You want to make sure that hair looks like this and is laying flat when done.Not looking like this with lines and it being all messy.When you are done they should look like this. A little bit more clipping and he will be great to show next weekend!

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