Needless to say I was very excited to go out to Auburn's Beef Unit. In my personal experience I have always enjoyed beef cattle people, they are very blunt, sarcastic, and have a good sense of humor. George Richburg did not disappoint when it came to this.
Let me set the scene here:
Our class consists of 8 girls, all of whom have no former experience with large animals. All of us have taken or are taking ANSC 1000, where we are basically scared to death by Dr. Coleman telling us how we can potentially die by a cow hitting us with their poll, or have
our calf muscle sliced open by an angry sow.
George comes limping into class with crutches and what looks like a body cast. I knew immediately that the exact same thought was going through all of our minds, "Holy crap, he totally got trampled by a cow." Finally one of us asked, "Um, just to clarify things, did an animal hurt you?"
George simply laughed and said, "No I rolled my truck a couple of times and flew through the windshield". George, we're glad you weren't trampled by a bull and we're glad you're here. George proceeded to explain to us some basic management techniques that Auburn used on their cattle, including ear notching, tattoo-ing, and vaccinating for Black Leg. This sounded like some pretty heavy duty tasks to me, and I was just a tad nervous when we were told that we were expected to do these during our lab
Thursday.
After the group met briefly and signed in with George in the office at the Beef Unit, we made our down to the chute. This was my first encounter with the “Silencer”.
The Silencer, a hydraulic squeeze chute, is intimidating, like its name, but that is where the similarities end. For one thing, this large piece of equipment is certainly not silent in any way shape or form.
The guys that work out at the beef unit had already loaded up the calves we were working with into the chutes leading to the Silencer. A calf would come through and one of the guys would pull the lever of the chute to automatically close on the calf’s head, and then they would proceed to put a little squeeze on around the ribcage to restrain the calf further. Since the calves were so small and the chute was originally designed for larger cows, a good amount of squeeze was required.
I was put on tattoo duty first, which was not as daunting as I had originally anticipated. Once the calf was restrained, I grabbed the calf’s right ear and cleaned the groove 2nd from the top using a toothbrush. After this I used the same toothbrush to smear a good amount of green tattoo ink onto the location of where the tattoo would be. I then loaded the tattoo gun with the appropriate letter and number sequence, slipped the clamp over the ear in the desired area and squeezed, hard. Most of the calves put up a little fight, but not bad. Once the clamp was removed I went back in and rubbed more tattoo ink into the area. First job, complete!
The second task in our line-up was ear notching. Pretty straightforward but a little sickening the first few times you do it. The purpose of ear notching is to collect a tissue sample to test to make sure that the calved are all healthy. The thing that is unnerving about the ear notch is that, a calf’s ear is pretty thick tissue, but the ear notching tool cuts a triangle out of that ear tissue so easily, almost too easily. Once the tissue sample is collected, it is placed into a numbered vial so that that calf can be later associated with the vial.
The third and final task was subcutaneous injections of the Black Leg vaccination. Subcutaneous refers to the space between the skin and the muscle, and is delivered by pulling the skin away from the neck and injecting into the space created by this. The trick is not to stab yourself with the needle or stick it through the other side of the skin. Luckily I avoided both of these.
We rotated through the different jobs until we had vaccinated, ear notched, and tattoo-ed every calf. As we were rotating, however, we began to notice that the amount of boys working the chutes and the silencer seemed to multiply. I think at one point there were about twelve people in the tiny workspace, 8 of them male, and definitely not enrolled in our class.
Needless to say I think we made quite the impression on the Auburn Beef Unit.
