Josh and I went to work cattle at the Van Zandt Ranch The first weekend in May. For those of you that don't know, Josh's grandfather "papa Joe" has a Ranch in a small town, Mobeetie, which is in the Panhandle of Texas. Papa Joe has tons and tons of land (6 sections I believe) and has a lot of cattle on that land. So every spring we get the opportunity to go work cattle, in other words get all the baby calves all tagged and vaccinated. Last year was my first experience working cattle, so I was no rookie this year. My job was "ear notching", which is where I take this contraption and cut a little notch out of the baby calves ears. It is kinda cool, except their ears bleed a lot when I do it! While I am doing this, others are holding the calves down, giving them shots, tatooing their ears, and putting a tag on the ears. It sounds like a lot, but there is a lot of people so each calf gets done in about 30 seconds. Here are some pictures of the experience:
WARNING: This next paragraphy is a little graphic :)
In this first picture, I tried to take a picture of a heffer who just had a baby calf. I was a little taken aback by the image I saw. Let's just say I have never seen childbirth/cow birth before. Apparently, everyone has an "afterbirth". In humans, you deliver the placenta after the baby. Same goes for cows, except their placenta stays attached to their hiney. So I saw this cow with a huge bloody placenta still attached and it freaked me out. It almost looked like a huge bloody ripped up tshirt attached to her. I thought something was terribly wrong and everyone just laughed at me because it is completely normal.
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