– Rory Lewandowski, Extension Educator, Athens County, Buckeye Hills EERA
I grew up in the era of Man vs. Nature, Man vs. Animal type of mentality. Working cattle was considered something of a contest and a battle. If you didn’t end the day feeling a little battered and bruised you probably didn’t work hard enough. Working animals involved hollering and waving arms, sticks and canes. The truckers who loaded cattle had hotshots and were not hesitant to use them.
Today we know that there are better ways of handling livestock and it shouldn’t resemble a battle but perhaps more like a dance. Folks like Bud Williams and Temple Grandin have demonstrated low stress livestock handling. It may be hard to break old habits, but in today’s social environment and with agriculture under increasingly close survey, the sooner all livestock owners learn and apply low stress livestock handling principles, the better. Besides, evidence clearly shows it is a more productive way of handling livestock. It is beyond the scope of this newsletter to cover this topic in detail. Books and journal articles have been written on the topic and there are web sites and videos dedicated to livestock handling. However, just to start the discussion here are a couple of basic low stress cattle handling terms and principles:
Flight zone: Unless the animal is completely tame and has no fear what-so-ever of humans, there will be a flight zone. The flight zone is how close you can get to the animal before it begins to move away from you. It could vary from several feet to several hundred feet.
Pressure and Release: Pressure and release works with the concept of the flight zone in handling animals. Stepping within the flight zone of an animal pressures it to move, to get away from the handler. Stepping back outside of the flight zone releases pressure, the animal feels safer, and it stops moving. Constant pressure inside the flight zone can, in some cases, cause the herd to run. Using pressure and release, starting and stopping movement, keeps the herd calmer and allows movement to become more directed and purposeful.
Point of Balance: Uses the concepts of flight zone and pressure and release to direct cattle movement. Many low-stress cattle handlers say the point of balance is the shoulder of the animal, although there are some that say it is the ear of the animal. I guess you can experiment with your animals to determine exactly where it is. Regardless, if a handler enters the animal’s flight zone from an angle behind the point of balance, the animal will move forward. If the handler enters the animal’s flight zone from an angle in front of the point of balance, the animal will move backward.
Reduce noise: Cattle are more sensitive to noise than people. Loud noises excite animals. Flight zones can increase. Good livestock handlers are very quiet, seldom speaking when they work livestock.
Vision through Cattle’s eyes: Cattle see differently than people do. They have a blind spot directly behind their head and see very well out the sides of their head (wide angle vision). Cattle have poor depth perception. While people have 140 degree vertical vision, cattle have only about a 60 degree vertical vision. This means they can’t see what is directly below their head when their head is up. To simulate this, hold your hands out horizontally, like blinders below your eyes. It changes your perspective on the world.
Moving speed: We often come into a cattle handling situation with an agenda or some sense of a time schedule. When things don’t go as planned, we start to hurry to try to make up for lost time. Moving fast, and trying to hurry and speed up the handling process, or making cattle move faster is a losing battle. In most cases, cattle speed is slower than our speed but moving at their speed will get the job done faster.
A good web site for those interested in doing more reading and learning about low stress livestock handling can be found at: http://www.grandin.com/behaviour/principles/principles.html. This is a good topic for practical, hands-on meeting or workshop such as the one mentioned below.