It gets real.

Bringing in the sheep, and guardian dog. You can see Fury looking out the other way. They go nutzo for cattle in the car, but sheep, not so much.

So today, they were a little behind because I guess the sheep had wandered a mile away, but with the help of four ranch hands, we were able to get the sheep into the arena and the dog out. I really need to brush up on my Spanish. It’s really annoying because I am semi-fluent but I second guess myself so while my accent is nice and I likely “know” the word, it doesn’t come easily. It’s a nice excuse to work on it, though. I love languages.

Here’s a photo of the crest of the hill I drop into to get to the sheep.

Anyway, so more of the same. I have totally sprained my ankle from last week and have been babying it, except when working sheep. This is stupid because while it’s not so bad when I do stuff, it’s currently throbbing as I type this. Oooops.

My big take away from that I need to get a longer line. I’m starting to understand why a lot of people start and recommend line work – they don’t have cushy sheep like Kathy has trained. Both dogs are pretty good if I am having them just move them around the perimeter.

Basically,what I did was take a group of ewes and lambs and just down the dogs there for a while while I worked on their fear of me. Rippa got pretty calm and bored.

In a couple seconds after I took this (and my camera died), one of the lambs went right up to Rippa and I stopped it before she was tempted to do anything. But yeah.

I started trying to do half moons but I think the sheer amount of sheep I had in there (with lambs) was too much so I kicked all but six sheep out (and a couple lambs remained, but it’s really, really hard to sort mamas and babies) and went back to just calming exercises as the sheep got weird because the herd had thinned.

I did a lot of walking up on the sheep and “there’s” while trying to teach Rippa her flanking commands (“way to” and “go by”) and reinforcing what “out” means (out from the stock). The problem I’m seeing with this is right now I think Rippa kind of thinks “out” means “get back” – which is when you turn away from the sheep and go in the other direction – because I can’t get her “out” to the fenceline without physically pushing her.

I took Rips off lead and did some half moon work, but one of the sheep invariably spazzes and it all goes to heck quickly. Though, felicitations – I have a good down on her again!

So, back on leash and I figured out I could pretty much do half moons and keep everything in control by keeping her on leash – so that when she was tempted to dive in, she’d just hit the end of the leash and get a solid correction.

The other nice thing about this process is Rippa doesn’t resent it. I have figured out that basically, unlike her mother who is just game to try stuff, Rippa is cautious. If she doesn’t get it, she is mad. But when she understands what she’s doing, she’s a lot happier. I think she understands that I want her to balance up and what not, and when I tell her she is good, she is pretty excited about it.

We had this one ewe with a young lamb who would not stay with the herd. She was a follower sheep so invariably she’d get in the dogs’ radar as I walked them around the arena. Any pressure and she’d turn and face them. A couple times I let the dogs give her a correction, but I also know that she’s basically trying to protect her lamb and that if the dog just stood its ground or gave space, she’d move sometimes, so we had to balance correction when she didn’t move with moving. This blew my poor dogs’ brains because they were very happy to accept the challenge. This, however, kind of undid the “calm collected walk up” stuff I was working on for a bit and stressed the sheep out.

Anyway, Fury is just overly stoked, while Rippa, having not developed terribly bad habits, is settling down nicely. She’s comfortable just standing and watching the sheep when they get on the fence and stay there,  but she is definitely stoked when they break away. I really wish I could get her between the fence and the sheep and we could start  trying to fetch, but the sheep do not get to come to me, and Rippa will get overly excited and undo “sheep” trust, so just gotta take time at this. I just hope that my half moons and leash training exercises aren’t crutching her in some way.

Was out there for a  good hour and a half, downing dogs and throwing stones out of the ring when Nathan came to show me the slaughtering.

When I showed up, he was like, “We’re killing cows today!” Now, you may not know this, but it’s not really legal to kill your own livestock. You usually have to ship them to a slaughterhouse, so I think he’s joking. “Nope, we have our own mobile unit!”

So, being an animal science major in another life, this I gotta see. He takes off for a while, and I figure I will hear the cattle lowing and screaming, but I don’t.
Now that I am done with the dogs, we head up the hill a bit and I come to your standard cattle sorting pen, only there’s this truck and a woman in a government vehicle hanging out.

I park the car and come see, and there are two guys, one taking off what looks like fireman turnouts, the other with a big plastic apron with various implements sticking out of the pockets. These guys are kind of funny, with a  rapport like the Mythbuster guys, only butchers. “Wait’ll you see our reality show next month! Which one of you wants to meet the baby cow Jesus?” When your business is killing, I imagine you have to find some humor in it.

There are two yearlings in the pen, and three dead cows in the truck. Basically, they get them in the squeeze chute, slit their throats, and then haul them into the truck to eviscerate and start butchering them. They’ve got a hose and a hole in the truck that goes into a drain in the ground.

Thoughts:

1 – this is awesome. I have never seen such low stress killing. The cows aren’t stressed at all from moment to moment.

2.  - Holy crap, cows’ stomachs look bigger than they are when they are out of the cow.

3.  - Nathan points out that the muscle is still twitching on one of the cow’s haunches even though it is more “slab of beef” at this point than cow.

Once they slaughter it, Elaine the USDA inspector, does her thing (and tells me how much better this is than working on the line at Harris Ranch), and they push it into a freeze at the front of the truck. It’s pretty fricking amazing. Ya’ll should totally patronize this ranch. Talk about the right way to raise beef. The same thing will happen with my sheep, as well.

And then it was time to go. But first, the dogs took a dip in the lake.