This is what happens with ear tags. This is the kind that the government wants to use to track cattle.

Local Animal ID

Yesterday, early, before milking even, I was out scrambling around on the ice, rapidly congealing pen in hand, (black ink only) participating in our personal brand of animal ID. As I tried to sneak around on each side of my victim I wondered why the heck our registered herd of Holstein cattle needs fancy tags and yet ANOTHER database to make them traceable.

See, Bariolee, daughter of Baton Rouge, calf of Beausoliel, daughter of Pat Berretta, daughter of LV Banana (and that is just from memory WITHOUT opening the herd book in the office) jumped out of the sawdust shed and went to see the bull. In order for her to get her registration papers, the Holstein Association needs a map of her spots. I was out in the just above zero temperatures drawing that map with a pen that was freezing up every couple of seconds. She should have been registered months ago when it was warmer. However, no one likes drawing the spotty ones and she is covered with little jiggles and speckles and such.

Now that she is "drawn" she has been turned in with Magnums Promise, our (also registered) milking shorthorn bull and both are enjoying a vigorous honeymoon. Hopefully a curly headed little black calf will show up in about nine months.

But can anybody tell me why these two animals need more identification than they already have. Not only is Lee, as we call her, purebred, registered, mapped AND already eartagged, but I can recite her pedigree back four generations without even getting out my notebook.
And tagging doesn't carry a lot of weight anyhow. We have a pen with eleven yearlings in it. All were tagged with the same type of tagging system the government advocates. THREE still have their tags! THREE! There must be something on the feed through that is snagging them. No problem though. All but two are registered and thus mapped, so all we have to do is look at their papers. Any anyhow, Liz knows most of them and I know the others.

And then there is the fact that about twenty years ago an animal from here triggered a test at the state when we sent her to the auction. There was nothing wrong with her, they had just changed the test and it was so super sensitive that there were a lot of false positives. You know what? They were on our farm testing the whole herd the next day. No forty-eight hour traceback, more like eighteen! They don't need a new system to traceback cows. They just want more control over our personal property.

Bah, humbug. At least the new camera will make it unnecessary for me to draw spotty calves any more. If the batteries don't freeze that is.

My bird watching assistant. She is not much help with the close ups.  

Robins

We had robins today, the first of 2006. They were a mix of the bright russet and almost black ones we normally see locally and the paler Canadian ones. The light colored ones are distinctly different and very pretty. I tried my darndest to get a nice photo with the new camera, but my assistant made that impossible. Maybe they will come back some time when she and her partner aren't hanging around. Every time I tried to sneak up into the bushes to get a shot, they were right behind me wanting to join in the fun.

I wouldn't have seen them at all if my dear friend hadn't gone outside for a minute and spotted them. We had a great day, getting the bookkeeping up to date, having soup as is our tradition, and catching up on each other's doings. I meant to send some soup home, but forgot.

Chicken Wrangling

Those danged chickens will not stay off the back porch. They seem to have developed a taste for cat food that just won't be quenched. Today I took out herding them away with all three border collies and what a sight that was. Four chickens, two hens, two roosters, with three black dogs in "driving" mode, pushing them away from the house. It might have seemed like overkill, but those birds are determined. They kept trying to cut back around the dogs, but three was just too many for them. They finally left and stayed away the rest of the day.

Driving is less natural to a border collie than gathering, that is bringing the animals towards you. Nick did me real proud, for a young dog with very little formal training (and none on hens). A short year ago he thought chickens were just made to be chased, and preferably popped like feather balloons. Today he worked like a pro, even though he is still limping from the hit by a car incident. He only angled around in front of them once, and then came right back "inside" when I called him in.

Mike showed what kind of dog he is, driving chickens with obvious disdain and turning towards the bull on the other side of the fence every time I called, "lie down". He knows what his calling in life is supposed to be and it doesn't have anything to do with poultry. I have never let him work the shorthorn bull, but he measured him as a threat and wanted to go put a whup on him so bad he was quivering with eagerness. I am unfailingly amazed by these dogs' ability to read stock and pick out the ones that mean harm. I can't let him go after the bull though, because of his age and the deep mud out there, but I sure would love to. That bull could use a little formal education. He doesn't like me much.

Editing Congressional Style

Here is a very interesting little story about members of our US Congress and their staffs doing a little freelance editing. Seems they hit the oh-so-changeable online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, and changed their own biographies, as well as "vandalizing" those of rivals. What good and honest sportsmen they are.

How bout this story?

This is amazing.

Hoofs and Honors

Liz made the dean's list again, third semester in a row. This is a good thing. The not so good thing is that she is having trouble with her transfer from the two year program into the four year Bachelor of Technology program, where they were supposed to put her when she enrolled in college in the first place.

But they didn't so she has to go through all this garbage. Other colleges are recruiting her like crazy; even Cornell keeps sending her stuff. However, her own school, where she is one of the better students, (Phi Theta Kappa and all), keeps sending her back and forth from office to office with no result. No one seems to know how to do an internal transfer. I guess they lose such a large percentage of their students at the two year point that they forgot what to do with the few who stay. She wants to stay so she can live home and take care of her own cows.....which works for me.

Meanwhile, she is taking hoof trimming at school, trimming cadaver feet right now, and we are all fascinated with the play by play. Who knew that cow feet could be so interesting?

Cold February Moon 

Milk and Meat good for you after all.

"These studies are revolutionary," said Dr. Jules Hirsch, physician in chief emeritus at Rockefeller University in New York City, who has spent a lifetime studying the effects of diets on weight and health. "They should put a stop to this era of thinking that we have all the information we need to change the whole national diet and make everybody healthy."

Our industries, beef and dairy, have been terribly harmed over the past few decades, by activist food police who have screamed and screamed and screamed that fat will kill you.

Whaddayaknow? They were wrong.

Liz aged 6, first fair ever 

Aged 19, this summer's fair 

Dear Abby

There was recently a letter in that column from a zoo keeper complaining about the idiotic things people tell their kids about animals, rather than getting the straight info from the zoo staff. I had to agree with the guy. Kids deserve good answers. If the parents don't have them, well then, what better time to teach the little folks how to find out, than when they really want to know something? We always took time to give the gang the best answers we could come up with, no matter where we had to look it up, and it paid off in a big way in school and 4-H.

Today the column ran a bunch of responses to that letter, including several wherein parents whined that they thought just taking the kids on an outing ought to be plenty, so why should they bother to actually take the time to learn anything?

My favorite though was from someone who had shown cattle and described some of the things they had overheard. Like that the ones with horns are bulls. And that brown cows give chocolate milk. Those hit home in a big way because I also have heard them too many times to count.

I spent at least one week a year for a good solid dozen years taking the kids to shows and fairs with the string. They never went without a parent until Liz turned 18 and started running things herself. At first they needed a lot of help with clipping and handling the stock. As time went on my contribution became more along the lines of nagging than helping, until most of my week was spent in a lawn chair with a good book and some nice, greasy fair food.

Thus I was in the perfect position to hear all of the misconceptions that city people have about cows. It is certainly okay for them not to know, why would they, but it bugged me that they didn't try to find out the right answers before they passed bad information down to their kids. All they had to do was ask and any farmer hanging around sweeping up straw or making the edge would have been happy to answer questions. I actually liked to discuss farm and animal issues with the public. One friendly, helpful farmer can overcome a heck of a lot of bad press generated by activist groups. There were only a few times where people were unpleasant. Most of them either belonged to PeTA or had spent a little too long in the beer tent.

Maybe that explains the guy who stopped and asked if Liz was Dixie's calf. There was simply no way I could convince him that the young person in jeans and tee shirt, asleep on top of the big old Holstein was my kid and owned the cow in question rather than belonging to her. I do not lie.

We need this tonight. Winter is back. 

Soldier Statistics

Here is an interesting story. I am not sure that the statistics mean a darned thing to bereaved families, but it does serve to put matters into perspective....and to make you want to keep your kids off motorcycles

TFS Magnum

There is a good post over at TFS Magnum. It says, better than I could, what I have been thinking about the Moslem protests over newspaper cartoons in Europe. I think the perpetrators of these violent protests need to understand that the whole world is not theirs to rule and that disrespect is not illegal, or at least not in free countries. Oh, and that respect is earned. They sure aren't earning mine.

Home 

Jupiter again, early dog walking time 

New Blog recommendation

Sarpy Sam, who writes my favorite blog, Thoughts From the Middle of Nowhere, has put up a second blog, No mandatory Animal ID, with a collection of his posts on this topic.

If you are a farmer this is a very important issue. I have been writing about it in the Farm Side until I am sure people are sick of hearing about it, but new rules are taking form like a runaway steamroller. Thoughtful people need to get the information in the hands of stakeholders before it is too late and the government takes even more control of our lives and our cows...and pigs...and chickens...and even parakeets. Sam has plenty of good thoughts on the matter and it would be worth your time to read this new blog. He calls what he writes "a voice in the wilderness."
He also said and rightly so, " Remember, an ear tag, ID number, or premise ID, never stopped a disease. Proper health and nutrition by caring people, not factory farms, provide disease prevention." His is a voice that needs to be heard.

Get me outta here!