Get along little dogies
The bruise on my ass (upper left cheek, to be specific) is about the size of a grapefruit. I say this without pride or chagrin; I am amotional about it. It is a few days old and the purple has faded into a malignant shade of yellow. Whereof this bruise? The school for which I work was given a ranch in 1998, according to the dying wishes of a rancher who had escaped an abusive father as a youngster and came to live at the school way back when. So, the school raises cattle and buffalo on the ranch, and once a year employees travel to it to help out with the annual branding day.
*****
On Thursday, at the cattle branding, I entered a pen with five high school boys and attempted to wrangle. I came away from the experience limping, with shit smeared on my jeans and shirt, and no newfound appreciation or other edifying nugget to speak of. I used to like to watch young, week-old calves spook at the sound of a car on the drive to work at my old job; they were spastic and clumsy things that came with spring. I used abstain from eating meat, now I do eat meat again and have for, what, three years now. This may or may not put me in a position to have gleaned some insight from the experience of working with animals that supply a large part of our food chain. I suppose it is a good thing to know what meat is, and what it goes through, before it’s meat. If there is a heaven, and if it contains talking animals which make clear to their human counterparts the complexities of the animal experience, I am not sure what cows will tell those of us who make it. Maybe being branded is the calves’ equivalent of going through puberty, having acne, being socially awkward, and roundly rejected by a self-assuredly meritocratic system. I can safely say, as someone who witnesses the brutalities of American teenagedom on a daily basis, that some kids experience the emotional and psychosocial equivalents of what transpires on branding day over and over and over and over again. Then again, we don’t eat teenagers.
*****
The pen was L-shaped, and the calves that arrived there were at the next to last stage of what they knew life to be up that point in their young ungulate lives. After we dispatched them to a chute, where they lined up ass to tail and waited for their turn, they would be branded with a marking that looks like an upside lower case “e,” inoculated, and the males of the group would be made into eunuchs. Early on, I learned that actual, knife-to-scrotum castration had been supplanted with something called the Elasticator, a small, hand-held plastic apparatus that looks like the things in supermarkets that workers use to reprice items. The Elasticator is used to apply an elastic band around the young male calf’s testicles, which band eventually cuts off blood flow entirely and consequentially causes the testicles to fall off. This raises the question of how a young male calf might respond to the sensation of seeing, but presumably not feeling, a very vital part of him fall to the ground.
I would say about twenty to thirty calves would be brought into our pen at a time, and we used a large swinging door or gate to cordon off six to eight at a time and section the L-shaped space into two distinct parts. Everyone who worked in the pen was required to wear catcher’s shinguards and I was by far the least experienced of anyone. It was quite a scene: green shit hosing out of calf sphincters, white eyes rolling back into heads, incessant bawling, and the periodic insane calf that threw itself at other calves and people with reckless abandon. There were two insane calves that I watched, but neither one of them came during my time down in the pen.
*****
A big show was made of wrestling the calves, as this was how branding traditionally went: three teams of ropers, wrestlers, and ground men/women worked together to catch, brand/inoculate/castrate, and release the calves. The ropers, as one would assume based on the nomenclature, ride on horses and restrain the calves with their ropes (called lassos) which are tied to parts of their saddle [(called dallies) Aside: my uncle, a master brick layer and weekend rodeo guy, lost a finger during a team roping event when the finger got caught up in the rope/dally combo]. They, the roper/horse unit, may also drag a calf to the fire where the branding iron is smoldering. Wrestlers – and here I am a little vague on the exact functionality of the position – throw the cattle down on their sides and restrain them while the brand is applied, the needle is plunged, and the knife is wielded. This is How Things Were Done In the Old Days, when men were men and whiskey was whiskey. As anyone familiar with country music’s penchant for nostalgia would surmise, there is much energy expended pining for those good old days when chutes and pens were nonexistent and calves were captured and “treated” in temporary fence structures out on that ole open range.
In the New FUBAR Days, a rancher may use a branding table, which is a small enclosure into which a calf is led that flips from vertical to horizontal status when a lever is pulled, leaving the calf exposed for brand, needle, and Elasticator application.
Anyway, calves are ornery little bastards, and few have ever been close to a human before, must less trapped in a confined space as a human tries to catch it. They are also surprisingly strong. The ass cheek injury is a testament to one particular calf with a white face that held a mystified expression and was oblivious to streaks of shit across the brow. I thought I was in control of the situation, but not having learned that one ought to grab the calf’s tail and twist it so the end faces the calf’s head so as to limit the calf’s ability to kick, the control I thought I had turned out to be ephemeral. The calf kicked me in the knee (lucky the shin guards were on), then slammed up against the side of the pen (forest green, stainless steel) as the teenagers looked on with embarrassed, but ultimately rejoicing looks. Impact made bruise. My modus operandi for most of the rest of time in the pen was to sit back and let the kids do the work. I made five or six heartfelt attempts to contribute, and in the process I was stepped on repeatedly, kicked in the side of the leg once (bruise, but smaller and not as colorful as ass bruise), and slammed against the pen four or five more times but with less force and, concurrently, less surprise.
The students were quite smooth. They made me look like a mildly disabled kook in the middle of an epileptic seizure. They were so good at this that a few took to cattle-surfing when the cattle first came into our section of the L and bunched up against the door. One particularly reckless, Indian James Dean-type individual was kicked in the balls twice, stepped on, kicked in the back of the knee (wholly unprotected), and kneed in the back of the kidneys by another student who was attempting to ride the calf. James Dean is a bullrider (I believe he’s sixteen – he hates Shakespeare, tolerates me, and goes by Squeaky in my class because of a hilarious voice-cracking question he asked during a spelling test a few weeks ago: it was after-school special level embarrassment but he didn’t care too much). I still like horses more than cattle, but there is no reason to think that I won’t volunteer to chaperone for this trip next year. Over and out.
*****
On Thursday, at the cattle branding, I entered a pen with five high school boys and attempted to wrangle. I came away from the experience limping, with shit smeared on my jeans and shirt, and no newfound appreciation or other edifying nugget to speak of. I used to like to watch young, week-old calves spook at the sound of a car on the drive to work at my old job; they were spastic and clumsy things that came with spring. I used abstain from eating meat, now I do eat meat again and have for, what, three years now. This may or may not put me in a position to have gleaned some insight from the experience of working with animals that supply a large part of our food chain. I suppose it is a good thing to know what meat is, and what it goes through, before it’s meat. If there is a heaven, and if it contains talking animals which make clear to their human counterparts the complexities of the animal experience, I am not sure what cows will tell those of us who make it. Maybe being branded is the calves’ equivalent of going through puberty, having acne, being socially awkward, and roundly rejected by a self-assuredly meritocratic system. I can safely say, as someone who witnesses the brutalities of American teenagedom on a daily basis, that some kids experience the emotional and psychosocial equivalents of what transpires on branding day over and over and over and over again. Then again, we don’t eat teenagers.
*****
The pen was L-shaped, and the calves that arrived there were at the next to last stage of what they knew life to be up that point in their young ungulate lives. After we dispatched them to a chute, where they lined up ass to tail and waited for their turn, they would be branded with a marking that looks like an upside lower case “e,” inoculated, and the males of the group would be made into eunuchs. Early on, I learned that actual, knife-to-scrotum castration had been supplanted with something called the Elasticator, a small, hand-held plastic apparatus that looks like the things in supermarkets that workers use to reprice items. The Elasticator is used to apply an elastic band around the young male calf’s testicles, which band eventually cuts off blood flow entirely and consequentially causes the testicles to fall off. This raises the question of how a young male calf might respond to the sensation of seeing, but presumably not feeling, a very vital part of him fall to the ground.
I would say about twenty to thirty calves would be brought into our pen at a time, and we used a large swinging door or gate to cordon off six to eight at a time and section the L-shaped space into two distinct parts. Everyone who worked in the pen was required to wear catcher’s shinguards and I was by far the least experienced of anyone. It was quite a scene: green shit hosing out of calf sphincters, white eyes rolling back into heads, incessant bawling, and the periodic insane calf that threw itself at other calves and people with reckless abandon. There were two insane calves that I watched, but neither one of them came during my time down in the pen.
*****
A big show was made of wrestling the calves, as this was how branding traditionally went: three teams of ropers, wrestlers, and ground men/women worked together to catch, brand/inoculate/castrate, and release the calves. The ropers, as one would assume based on the nomenclature, ride on horses and restrain the calves with their ropes (called lassos) which are tied to parts of their saddle [(called dallies) Aside: my uncle, a master brick layer and weekend rodeo guy, lost a finger during a team roping event when the finger got caught up in the rope/dally combo]. They, the roper/horse unit, may also drag a calf to the fire where the branding iron is smoldering. Wrestlers – and here I am a little vague on the exact functionality of the position – throw the cattle down on their sides and restrain them while the brand is applied, the needle is plunged, and the knife is wielded. This is How Things Were Done In the Old Days, when men were men and whiskey was whiskey. As anyone familiar with country music’s penchant for nostalgia would surmise, there is much energy expended pining for those good old days when chutes and pens were nonexistent and calves were captured and “treated” in temporary fence structures out on that ole open range.
In the New FUBAR Days, a rancher may use a branding table, which is a small enclosure into which a calf is led that flips from vertical to horizontal status when a lever is pulled, leaving the calf exposed for brand, needle, and Elasticator application.
Anyway, calves are ornery little bastards, and few have ever been close to a human before, must less trapped in a confined space as a human tries to catch it. They are also surprisingly strong. The ass cheek injury is a testament to one particular calf with a white face that held a mystified expression and was oblivious to streaks of shit across the brow. I thought I was in control of the situation, but not having learned that one ought to grab the calf’s tail and twist it so the end faces the calf’s head so as to limit the calf’s ability to kick, the control I thought I had turned out to be ephemeral. The calf kicked me in the knee (lucky the shin guards were on), then slammed up against the side of the pen (forest green, stainless steel) as the teenagers looked on with embarrassed, but ultimately rejoicing looks. Impact made bruise. My modus operandi for most of the rest of time in the pen was to sit back and let the kids do the work. I made five or six heartfelt attempts to contribute, and in the process I was stepped on repeatedly, kicked in the side of the leg once (bruise, but smaller and not as colorful as ass bruise), and slammed against the pen four or five more times but with less force and, concurrently, less surprise.
The students were quite smooth. They made me look like a mildly disabled kook in the middle of an epileptic seizure. They were so good at this that a few took to cattle-surfing when the cattle first came into our section of the L and bunched up against the door. One particularly reckless, Indian James Dean-type individual was kicked in the balls twice, stepped on, kicked in the back of the knee (wholly unprotected), and kneed in the back of the kidneys by another student who was attempting to ride the calf. James Dean is a bullrider (I believe he’s sixteen – he hates Shakespeare, tolerates me, and goes by Squeaky in my class because of a hilarious voice-cracking question he asked during a spelling test a few weeks ago: it was after-school special level embarrassment but he didn’t care too much). I still like horses more than cattle, but there is no reason to think that I won’t volunteer to chaperone for this trip next year. Over and out.
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9:36 AM
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