Did you know that animal husbandry/ animal handling is a subject you can study? All across the country in high school ag programs and on college campuses this course is taught to students studying animals? To give an example, there are professors at Purdue University that not only teach these courses, but they conduct research studies on how animals behave in different environments for animals such as chickens, turkey, pig, and dairy calves. One way researchers do this is by putting up cameras and tagging specific animals to watch on these cameras. After the video tape is recorded, a student will count how many times that animal performs a specific behavior, and the researchers can quantify them! Another example is that we can actually count how long a cow lays down and how many times they chew their cud!
Animal behavior is extremely important to understand if you are going to raise livestock properly. Even though all this research is going on at the university level, most farmers learn their animal handling skills by being on farms every day with their livestock. Today, we wanted to talk about the importance of keeping animals calm when we work with them for our vaccination and breeding program.
Believe it or not, the practice of calm handling starts with selecting the right animals and constantly being around them so that they know you. We like to compare training the cows to teaching puppy tricks! This handling starts when they are calves. We are constantly around them and in their pen so that they are familiarized with us. As they grow we continue to walk through the groups on foot so that they know a human walking isn’t anything to be scared of! We follow this by constantly rotationally grazing the cows during the grazing season. They learn what to do when we call them to come. They then follow us to pretty much anywhere we go. The key is to have the cows associate you with food and they will always want to be around.
If the cows don’t follow these practices and we have to change our structure to handle them, we sell them. For example, Bryan and Tabby bought some cows from a farm in Missouri a few years ago and several of them didn’t get to stay because of the way their behavior was. A couple of cows didn’t like to follow when we moved them, they were always nervous around us, and they would freak out when we put them in any enclosed space. These type of animals just do not fit on the farm.
When it comes to working or moving the cows, we always do so calmly. They know if human tensions are high and they will feed off of that tension. We do our best not to make noises or sudden movements when working them. It is also important (especially with young calves) to let them see where you want them to go. Calves can move quicker than we can, so allowing them to see where they are going is helpful.
When sorting animals there is a philosophy we use called “flight zone”. Google defines an animal's flight zone as the personal space around an animal that causes it to move away when being encroached upon. You can sort animals better by moving your body to move according to these flight zones. If you move closer, the cows move differently depending on where you step within that zone.
All these factors combined work together to create a more enjoyable experience when working cows. Most of the time when following this strategy we can avoid the cuss words!
Love,
Olivia, Tabby, Gina, & Kendra
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