My girls are gone

It has been only a few hours and I already miss my "girls". My place seems so empty without them. The same story every year - you'd think I would get immune to this feeling. It isn't like their leaving was a big surprise as I knew this day was coming for a few weeks now. But I still miss them.

I suppose this feeling has been magnified by the cattle being in the corral since yesterday, and my spending time with them feeding bags and bags (and bags) of apples. I also harvested my broccoli, uprooted the plants and fed them to the cattle. The best for my "girls".

Who are going to eat the extra apples now?

I think the cattle were getting spoiled with apples. They are usually quiet and content cattle but early this afternoon when I was outside and didn't bring them another bag of apples some of them (Dan's ) started to bellow. My girls are well behaved.

Dan and his brother, Don, were both going to haul the cattle in their trailers. Don has a long goose-neck trailer that can hold lots of animals. We only used Don's trailer as Dan's pickup tire flatted just as he arrived at Don's house. Dan had dropped off a couple cattle in Don's pasture. After working on the tire they drove out of the pasture. After they left the pasture they were surprised to find a horse from the pasture had climbed into the back of the open stock trailer and rode out. I guess it was kind of like a prison movie where the inmate hides in the laundry truck and rides out of prison.

I easily led the cattle into the loading corral as they all followed me expecting more apples. Loading them into Don's trailer was another matter. They got most way down the runway then balked. The runway was still wide enough that the small ones could squeeze around to turn around. We had to let them back to the end of the runway and try again. Again one of Dan's cattle (#57) turned around.

Then we got half the group in the trailer before another one turned in the runway and when resetting these, the cattle in the trailer came back out. *argh!*

We then got half in, closed a divider so they couldn't come out then drove the rest in. Or I should say, all but one. The trailer was a foot or two from the end of the loading corral and one steer trying to avoid entering the trailer got its head and neck between the trailer and loading corral before it got stuck. Fortunately it was the last one of the group so we moved the trailer to let it out. As we had to make two trips to haul them to the cattle broker, Rich's, place, we left him behind with the second group.

Rich's place had a number of pens to separate them. After unloading the cattle we sorted them into three pens: my cattle (all heifers), Dan's heifers, and Dan's steers. Steers and heifers fetch different prices so that is why we separated them by sex.

When loading the second batch we found there were a few more than we thought. We initially tried to split the loads into two groups of thirteen. There was the one that had slipped out during the loading so that should be 12 and 14. It turns out Don miscounted when we had made the first group. The split ended up being 11 and 15. After lots of encouragement for him to make his way inside we barely squeezed the 15th cattle into the trailer.

Like the first time, this loading also had several animals who turned around midway in the loading chute. This time one of my girls was the main culprit. In driving the cattle down the runway it seems if they went single file one would turn around, otherwise multiple cattle tried to squeeze down the runway.

At one point I thought the runway's south fence was going over as it leaned way over from the weight of three or four animals in a space for one or two animals. Dan's wife on the outside and ran over - not to hold the fence but encourage the "log jam" to break apart. I was in the back of the animals and couldn't split them. Her action worked as the animals moved into more of a single file and the fence held.

You know the story by now: I need to put the corral fence rebuild on my to-do list.

I received a small kick on my thigh in the beginning when the cattle were outside the runway, but took care to watch out for hooves during the excitement in the runway. One time when the cattle turned and ran back I was buffeted around as they moved past me.

I tried the nice talk and encouragement but that didn't work so we had to do a lot of shouting and smacks on their rear. Dan did the smacking as he had a whip stick. Dan was still recovering from a triple root cancel on Thursday, so his patience with the cattle only went so far. I heard him use a few four letter words as encouragement to get the stubborn ones to move.

Rich will weigh the cattle tomorrow morning at 8 am. The cattle won't have food or water from this afternoon till the weighing. This will account of shrinkage, instead of taking two or three percent off the total weight. The good thing for Dan and I is the temperature today barely reached 50 F and the overnight low is suppose to be near freezing. So, no hot weather where the cattle would lose more weight in the heat.

I plan on being there for the weighing of the cattle. So an early night to bed for me.