Animal Handling II

I have no horsey news to share but I still have animal stories!!! I am in Animal Handling II which is the class required of all freshman entering the Pre-Vet program here at Findlay. I am handling food animals. This means I work with pigs, sheep, goats, llamas, beef and dairy cattle, donkeys, and poultry. So far I have worked with piglets, lambs, sheep, goats, kids, and calves.

We began working with the sheep. The first thing I learned how to do was throw down a sheep or flipping sheep as we call it. It wasn't easy to catch the sheep because they are bound to their flock. But once you catch them you begin the process of, to put it quite frankly, sitting them on their butt. We started off with the small ewes. They only weighed about 100 pounds. Once we flipped them we trimmed their feet. Randy would be proud, I am an excellent hoof trimmer. LOL. The following week we moved onto another pen with much bigger ewes. They were about 250 pounds. And yes this girl can throw a 250 pound ewe no problemo. We did the same thing as we did with the smaller sheep.

Next we worked with piglets. There were 13 sows in the barn all who would farrow (give birth) in the next two months. The farrowing room has six pens and is kept at 80 degrees all the time. We each took a piglet and gave it two injections, clipped its needle teeth, docked its tail, notched its ears (this tells the farmer what litter the pig came from and which pig it is in the litter), and castrated the males. Just gonna let you know pigs smell. And a room kept at 80 degrees plus the pig smell is not nice. It sticks with you even after you shower and scrub your skin raw. It's worse than sheep smell.

We moved on to lambs because the ewes were lambing. We gave them injections for vitamin e and selenium deficiencies and tetanus shots. We also ear tagged. Gotta tell you that ear tagger is huge. I had to use two hands. hahaha I was the first in my class to volunteer to dock a lambs tail. Yes my face did get a little red because I was concentrating so much. But I did it!!!! Did my second tail docking yesterday. It was one big tail I'll tell you that. Dr. Kerns was yelling, "You go girl, you go girl!" LOL I got it done. This girl is beastly.

Working with the calves was fun too. We have about 18 bucket calves (the drink milk from buckets). All of them are dairy cows. We have holsteins, jerseys, and ayrshires. They are very cute but they spread disease called kryptosporidiosis so we have to be very careful when handling them and make sure we wash our hands afterwards. Anyways. We halter broke all the calves. They are so funny because they have never walked outside of their calf pen before so they fall down alot. We learned how to tie them using a "proper" safety release knot. And I learned how to do a butterfly knot. I'll explain when I get home. Need to demonstrate. We also learned the reef which is a rope we knot around the calves body and tighten causing them to lay down so we can restrain them for procedures. It's great fun. Wish it worked on people. We gave injections, tatooed, ear tagged, implanted (synthetic hormones that make the calf grow faster), and practiced the reef on them. Great fun.

That's all we've done for now. Next week we are gonna be finishing up the second set of piglets and castrating them. Then we will move on to castrating the dairy calves and dehorning them. Thought everyone would like to hear what I had been up to. I promise I will have lots of stories to tell when I come home. :)