You cannot substitute articles and
videos on reduced stress cattle handling procedures for real time,
hands on experience to become proficient at handling cattle. Few of
these articles and videos address the differences involved between
handling cattle on foot or on a horse. Fewer still describe how, by
simply changing the angle of your horse's body in respect to the
cow, you can control the cow's speed and direction.
For a person handling cattle horseback
on a ranch, or riding pens in a feedlot, you cannot learn how to
handle cattle in a reduced stress manner without including
horsemanship. Low stress cattle handling is synonymous with good
horsemanship, you can't have one without the other. While those
teaching low stress cattle handling on foot concentrate on reading
cattle and making small corrections to keep things going, many of
those teaching it from horseback are still doing many of the same old
things. Keeping a horse parallel to a cow, beating it to the fence
and working, prey/predator relationship, and training cattle to
drive.
The word natural is over used and
often misconstrued. The way your cattle act right now is only their
natural reaction to what you are doing. The key to low stress cattle
handling is to do things in a manner which naturally gets cattle to
doing what we want in a calm manner.
If we are driving a cow and keeping
our horse parallel to the cow and decide we need to turn it, we start putting pressure on their eye
to get them to turn away from us. When we do this we turn our horse
towards the cow and they speed up and try go around us. We blame the
cow for speeding up and trying to go around us, but we are the one
who turned on that switch in the cow to get that reaction.
In the same situation if we are
tracking the cow with a slight amount of lateral movement on our
horse we can actually ask the cow to turn by taking pressure off the
cow. We do this by asking our horse to speed up slightly while moving
laterally away from the cow. When we do this, we are taking away both
the instinct of the cow to speed up and to go around us. Instead the
cow feels as if its opportunity to go around us is taken away. At
this point, rather than being excited and wanting to get around us,
the cow's reaction is to turn slowly (without stress) away from us
and in the direction we want.
In order to take advantage of the
above natural instinct of cattle, we need to develop our horsemanship
to a higher level. At times we can slow a cow by simply changing the
angle of our horse in relationship to a cow. Essentially, the better
our horsemanship is, the more we can master low stress cattle
handling. This isn't to say our horses have to be perfect, as there
is no true perfection. However if we master our horsemanship enough
we can take advantage of methods to handle cattle with lower amounts
of stress, not only on the cattle, but on our horses and ultimately
on ourselves. The easier you make things on the cow, the easier it is
on your horse, and the easier it is on you.
The answer to the conundrum of how to
learn both the horsemanship techniques and the lower stress reactions
of cattle is to learn them both at the same time. After years of
thought on the matter I have designed a clinic program which
addresses both the horsemanship and low stress instincts of cattle.
As learning all of this is intensive, hands on clinic sizes will be
limited to a total of seven participants, including crew or owners of
sponsoring ranches. To learn more of my methods and all these clinics
cover visit my main website.
I am now accepting host ranches for
2012 clinics. If you are going to be running yearlings, coinciding a
clinic when you receive cattle, they will be calm and easy to handle
when you turn them out with no additional labor costs. If you are
running an AI breeding program I can also include training on how and
when to pen your cattle for minimum stress and optimum conception. If
you would like to host a clinic, email
me me and we will make arrangements.
