Branding

Yesterday afternoon, I ventured into uncharted territory. Well, uncharted at least for a born-and-raised-city-girl like me. Along with prince charming and a friend of ours, Aaron, I helped brand, vacinate and castrate about 40 calves. (We only castrated the boys.)

I'm mostly going to let the pictures speak for themselves (which they can do in abundance!). But I will give you some background. The family are very good friends of ours who live on a ranch and graciously invite us, as well as almost a dozen other college students, out every Sunday for dinner and fellowship. It is well known that anyone is welcome to come by whenever the mood strikes them and this family of 8 (including grandma), will always be happy to see, and usually feed, you. When we arrived, The Dad (Kelly), Mom (Cindi) and oldest child, a daughter named Rachel, were finishing up with the mama cows. Every year at springtime, the mama cows are run through the chute so they can get their shot of vitamins. Their part is pretty quick and relatively painless. Their babies, however, get a little more attention. The calves have all been born within the last month and a half. They need to be branded, vacinated for various diseases, and the boys need to be castrated.

This is Rachel. She is very sweet. But she also knows how to wrestle heifers. She pushed the calves down the chute into the contraption that we used to hold them down while we worked on them. She also held the front legs so they couldn't squirm too much when they were being given a shot and branded.

This is Kelly. He took a lot of kicks to his stomach cause he was working the back ends. He would hold the back legs, check if it was a boy or girl, and then castrate the boys. (I'll explain how they castrate them a little later. Guys may want to skip that part.)

This is our friend Aaron. She gave the shots and prepared the castrating tool. We kept her at the safest end so that she wouldn't get kicked. She's carrying a baby and a strong kick from a powerful back leg to the stomach did not sound like a good idea for her.



This is Prince Charming. He worked the table. We worked together to cinch the cows down with the metal bars (I worked the head bar) when Rachel would run them into the machine. Then he would heave them on their side (some of these babies were near 400 lbs!) while the rest of us worked on them. He also took over branding the last half. Since the smell of the burnt calf hair and flesh was kinda getting to me.

This is me. Like I said, I helped my prince with slamming the metal shut on the calves so they couldn't just run through, stopping for just a few minutes to snap pictures and document this process for you lovely people. I also branded the first half of the group.



This is the brand. It is hot.


These are our victims...I mean patients.

This is the table in use.



These are the concerned mama cows. The entire time we worked. there was constant concerned "moo-ing" from the mama's to their babies and the babies answering back.

Here is how things worked.

Rachel drives a contestant down the chute, towards the table.

Then, Prince and I slam our respective parts of the table shut at just the right moment to keep the calve from just running all the way through. Prince charming then pulls the calf and table to a horizontal position. Rachel and Kelly grab their feet.

Aaron administers the vaccine to the lower neck.

Kelly then checks to see if it is a boy or a girl. If it is a girl, we move straight to the branding and let her go. If it is a boy, he gets a little more "special" treatment. (Guys, this is where you might want to close your eyes and just scroll down)

To keep the boys from becoming bulls, filled with testosterone and attitude, they are castrated. Some operations simply cut off the testicles. But here is how we do it:

Kelly grabs the testicles. Rachel hands him a special tool that has a very strong, very small, rubber band on it. Using this tool, Kelly "bands" the testicles with the rubber band close to the calve's body. This cuts off the circulation. Over the next few weeks, the testicles will eventually just fall off.


Poor guy. I imagine this is the same look on the face of any guy who dared read this part.

Then the boy gets branded.

And sent off to join mama. Go free, little guy. And bask in the knowledge that you'll never have to go through that again.

If it isn't that much consolation, I understand. You've been through a lot.

Someday

Someday, I’ll have photoshop. Someday, I’ll be able to edit, enhance, crop, clean up, and play with my photos until I’ve sat so long in my chair that moss starts growing (believe me, it could happen when playing with photos – its addicting). Someday, I’ll have a high powered computer that can handle uploading the high MB, fat photos that I’ll edit with my photoshop. Someday, I’ll have a tiny waist and smaller calves. Someday, a lot of things will happen. But today, my waist is in good competition with my hips and I still have the thick, soccer-player calves that my Dad gave me. Oh, and today I don’t have photoshop.

But I do have a pretty sweet camera that can mimic a few of the more basic actions of photoshop. And I’ve been having some fun with that. It isn’t nearly as advanced as what photoshop can accomplish, but it gets the job done in a rough, primitive way.

On Saturday, my beloved Prince Charming and I went on a small hike/walk with our good friend Aaron. (Sidenote- Aaron is, in fact, a girl. She is married to our other good friend, Joe, but her name is spelled in the masculine because her parents wanted to be biblical.) The hike part is the first 1/3 of a mile, steeply uphill, and it was fairly muddy on Saturday considering the amount of precipitation that was dumped on it the week before. The rest of the walk follows an old rail road track as it winds along with the mountainside it was carved out of.

I took along my camera, tried to be kind of artsy and then became even more artsy when I played with the editing functions on my camera. Here are some of the fun things I did.

I’m mostly going to show you a select few of the different functions as they affected one of my artsier pictures. Here is the shot straight out of the camera (sooc).

I think it is a fun shot. Of course, I have an overly creative mind. I can imagine that this is a weary traveler. Someone trying to follow the straight and narrow path of life as easily as he can follow the straight and narrow tracks.

Now, the simplest things to play with, and what most digital cameras can do, is to make the picture either black and white or sepia tone. As follows.

This is the same guy. Only 70 years ago. Funny how history repeats itself.

These are nice. Simple. Classic. (Although I will pause to mention that a bonus feature my camera has is to make the sepia and the black and white different levels of each.)

The next thing I did was tack the SOOC shot and imposea tint of yellow over it. My Camera can do several different tint colors, in 3 different levels. This is the lowest level of yellow.


I like this effect. It adds a little bit of rustic quality to the photo, makes it less severe, but doesn't go all the way to "old-timey" the way sepia does. I have a lot of fun with this effect.

One of my other favorite actions is to "extract" color. Basically, I can choose either red, blue, green or purple and the camera will only pull that color. Leaving everything else black and white. Here, I extracted yellow only:

Call me weird. But I enjoy the fact that now you can clearly see the color of the tall grass and his pants, but his hands, water bottle and everything else is a dull shade of gray. This photo tells me how one can find color and meaning in the oddest places, while oneself remains lost and unsure.

The next feature that I really appreciate is the "soft" feature. It kind of rubs the edges of the photo to make it more surreal and dreamlike. It looks pretty cool. Here, I softened the sepia version. Ooooooo. Here is the dream I could have had about long ago. In my dream, this is a young man, on the cusp of leaving his childhood so that he can go work in the mines to support his family, now that Pa has succombed to influenza. Ma is doing all she can to keep hose and home together, but there are 7 other mouths to feed and he is the oldest, so it is his responsibility. He takes one last day to play with his brothers on the train tressel as they had done so many other times. But tomorrow, he must pack up his childhood in his tin lunch box and leave for the dark labarynth of the mines instead of walking with his brothers and friends to school.

I had fun mixing different effects, like in the above photo. I already showed you the black and white feature, as well as tinting colors. The next photos, I started with the black and white and then tinted them different colors.

First, I did blue.

Fun. Kind of gives it a gloomy feel. But this might be a little TOO blue. It comes off more comical than anything.

Ahh, that's better. It is the same color blue tint, but at a softer level. It isn't so in your face. This is a more realistic gloominess. This guy could be walking the tracks, trying to piece together his life after loosing his love.

This one was a light green tint. I like it. But I'm not sure why. Although, I probabaly should have brightened it some. The pants look so dark, there is hardly any distinction between legs. Oh well. It is hard to tell stuff like that on a small viewing screen.

For the last three photos, I'm going to switch pictures. Here is the SOOC shot.


Good picture of the smiling prince charming (isn't he handsome?) but the sky is pretty washed out. It makes the entire picture seem over-exposed and ho-hum. In photoshop, I would probably have several different ways of bringing the sky back and livening up the photo. But with only my camera edit options, I got to make do.


Here, I jsut tinted the photo a light shade of red. It doesn't completely fix the washed our sky (maybe if I had used a blue tint....ahhh, hindsight), but it at least livens up the phot a little bit and brings some warmth to the scene.

I have a lot of fun playing with my camera. I still have a lot of buttons and menus to lear. hopefully, the more I learn, the less I'll need photoshop.

And now, because I can, I'll leave you with this: