You've heard of "roundup" but have you ever heard of "rounddown"? (The spellchecker insists I use a hyphen but it doesn't really know what I'm talking about.)
Last week I pulled into the farm and told Martin the van needed gas.
"I'll get it for you right after I help James load a couple of steers. Should only take a few minutes," Martin confidently declared as he put down his half-finished lunch and headed out the door to the corral, oblivious to what awaited him.
Jeannie and I caught up on what was happening on the farm and got a few things ready for me to take home. A half hour passed and Martin still wasn't back so I decided to load the van.
"Sounds like a rodeo out there – cattle bawling, metal gates rattling," I nonchalantly remarked to Jeannie when I stepped back into the store.
While Jeannie and I were visiting with a couple of ladies who dropped by to get groceries, Martin marched into the store with a look of determination, not to mention perplexity and disgust. It was sad, definitely foreboding.
We stared at him with anxious expectation. What now?!
Here's Martin's story….
I've never seen anything like it. I knew the old loading chute was poorly designed. We'd even been talking lately about redesigning and relocating it. But I've never had animals respond to it this way before. They just weren't acting naturally. It was scary.
We pushed the three big steers into the small holding pen without too much difficulty. Normally they calm down and just stand there waiting for a gate to open, but this was different. They immediately started circling and becoming agitated. I opened the gate to the alleyway that leads to the headgate, so we could push the cattle through and switch out their simple farm ear tags for the silly government mandated radio frequency ID ear tags.
After a couple smacks on the backside, the tallest steer started striding towards the headgate. I was momentarily relieved thinking things had returned to normal. That's when he saw that a bottom fence board was loose and the soil underneath was eroded. Rather than taking a step forward into the headgate, he took a hard left put his thick neck under the bottom board and trashed it. He proceeded to limbo underneath the second lowest fence board, dragging his belly on the ground just to squeeze through. I could hardly believe it.
After I finished shaking my head, we ran him back around into the holding pen. He wasn't going to make this easy. He circled around evaluating all his escape options. Normally, I don't have a problem staying in the pen with cattle, but I was getting nervous. Then, before I had a chance to jump the fence, he beat me to it.
He reared up on his hind legs and leaped through the air about as ungracefully as you can expect of a fat steer. He landed on top of the gate, four legs off the ground, where he thrashed for a quick moment, left the gate in ruins and barely teetered over the other side of the gate to freedom.
Again, I shook my head in amazement. I let it go and began to focus on the remaining two steers. But it wasn't going to be that easy. The second tallest steer attempted to follow in the footsteps of his buddy, further trashing the sorry gate, but without actually making it to the other side. Counting myself fortunate that he didn't escape, I collected myself for a moment. I backed away so we could all calm down. Then with no pressure, the same steer turned around and jumped the gate on the other side of the pen. He caught his leg in the gate on the way over and bent the tube steel like spaghetti, shaking himself loose.
After much frustration we tagged the remaining steer and loaded him into the trailer. The tallest steer was suddenly more cooperative and decided the trailer was the place to be. He ran up the ramp and joined the other steer without even being tagged first. I wasn't going to argue. There was no way I was going to risk opening the trailer door to load another steer and let two steers out, so I put the tag in James' hand and told him to tell the folks at the other end that we'd tried our best.
James soon returned to load the last steer. We very carefully coaxed him into the head gate, switched out his tag and then tried to load him into the trailer. It wasn't working. We tried hooting and hollering and pushing and shoving. It wasn't going to happen. All he would do was back up. He was not going in that trailer.
That's when I had an idea. He didn't have to go into the trailer walking forwards. He was turned around at this point anyway, so I just started pushing on his nose and he backed up all the way down the alley, up the ramp and into the trailer.
The moral of this story is simple. If you don't build a loading chute ass backwards, you won't have to load your cattle ass forwards.
