Whether you blame global warming or not, droughts have become much more rough in the past five years. This year has been no exception, and so wildfires have been a problem. There is little you can do to control the fires other than build dirt moats to stop the fire in its path. So lots of grass is often lost and only charred earth and burnt palms remain.
I spent a morning working with bulls last week. It was a big change from dealing with cows as the animals look very different, are more agressive and are used (obviously) for a very different use than the cows.
When we showed up to the corral, I carried in a new set of vaccinations/medications I had not seen before when we were dealing with the cows. One of the boxes said it was a medication for tristeza. Not knowing what tristeza was, I pulled out my dictionary. The translation is sadness, which made me think that it was a medication for depression, which obviously sounds very weird. I later learned, that tristeza is a disease transmitted by ticks in the region. When the bulls contract the disease they hang their heads low and move very slowly, giving the appearance that they are sad, hence the name.
The reason that the bulls here get the disease, is because many of our bulls are bred in the south, where there are no ticks. When they come north, they have not built up an immunity as calves to the diseases the ticks carry and so get sick very easily. In fact, the day I was working with the bulls, four died in 24 hrs! That is a troubling loss rate.
When breeding naturally, you need to have 3% bulls in your herd. So 3 bulls for every 100 cows. The work that was being done with the bulls was identifying and separating the different bulls into the different herds of cows. Bulls come in all shapes and sizes. The best bulls were separated to be put with the cows who would be conceiving without their calves. This is because cows have a greater chance of getting pregnant when they don't have their calves, and so you want to produce more offspring with better genes. There was a large number of bulls that were separated for the slaughter house. These were either too old, didn't have a good appearance or had an ailment. One bull for example had a massively swollen testical, which meant it could not longer reproduce, and another had a scrotum diameter that didn't measure up to the minimum size it should be at the age of the bull, which means it doens't have an optimal reproductive and growth system. Cutting block for them all!
The bulls are all tagged. Diego and the captain at Corai Cue first identified to which herds they needed to introduce bulls, and then handpicked the bulls identifying where each animal goes. This is where you see the importance and labour involved with being able to run a traceable and transparent operation where the operators know the value, health and location of their most valuable assets, their bulls.
This cow has anteojos, sunglasses. On cows that have white faces, their eyes are more vulnerable to the sun and they get eye infection more easily. So you will often see that they have black or brown patches around their eyes that act as sunglasses!
Some cows are more brave and more stubborn than others. This cow for example did not like the idea of being corralled at all. The first time it escaped, it jumped out of the corral passage right behind me! I had to jump down to get out of the way. It then jumped into the paddock with all the bulls so it didn't feel alone. We later had it separated again, and it tried to escape a second time. The gauchos however were able to push back against the cow back to get it into the stall. the two pushing forces, cow against gauchos, however resulted in the cow tipping onto its backside in the stall - it was stuck like a turtle unable to get to its feet. I thought the whole thing was quite hilarious, though it was a lot of work to flip the cow back over.
No comments:
Post a Comment