Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Ranch Wife Duty

I shot an interesting video yesterday evening of one of our bulls pawing up dirt, but couldn't get it to upload. So we'll just have to settle for a picture.

Most of my readers probably don't get to see anything like this very often, and I usually just talk about the sheep, wool, and yarn side of things, so I thought I'd give you a little peek at another side of farm life and "ranch wife duty." (Don't worry...I'm not crazy, there was a sturdy gate between the bull and myself. I just held the camera between the bars of the gate.)

Women who are married to cattlemen often get involved in all sorts of interesting activities. When your husband comes to the house and says, "Can you come outside for a minute?" you never know what you might get into.

This particular instance was pretty "incident-free." We simply had to haul one of the bulls from one place to another in the stock trailer. My job included watching while my husband backed the trailer up to the barn door and letting him know how close he was getting, then pulling the pickup forward and out the gate after he got the bull loaded. When we got back over here, he opened the gate on the back of the trailer to let the bull out, and I caught it and held it back. The bull was kind of stirred up for awhile, so I went in the house and got the camera to take a video of him pawing up dirt. He's doing that a little bit in the picture, too.

My "ranch wife duty" often involves helping with such things as raking hay, rounding up cattle from the pasture (that can be interesting), catching the cattle in the head gate so the men can vaccinate and work them, filling syringes, checking heifers who are about to calve, feeding an occasional bottle calf, etc.

It can be a little scary at times, and sometimes you get in the path of some flying "green mud" as I like to call it, but it's never dull, that's for sure.

1 comment:

Marie said...

Wow! I had no idea you had a working ranch on your hands besides the sheep. I can't imagine the amount of work that goes into running it.

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