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Stop the front feet!

Here are more thoughts on animal behavior and keeping them content and get the most out of environment and feed available for weight gain and reproduction. 

I look at having cattle that are right in the mind is to have animals that respond when pressured, and have their needs in mind when pressure is off. 

I have been real interested in getting the most out of my horses, but still getting them to relax and get still and content when my pressure comes off, but be ready to respond without over responding when asked. You can call this a part of feel. They feel my pressure, or read what I want. 

The way to achieve this is to separate the pressures so they understand how torespond to the pressures. When you ask animals to stop, if you teach them to stop the front feet instead of the whole body, this lets them think their way to a stop and that’s when animals learn, because they take the pressure of themselves. 

If you are working with a herd, stop the leaders front feet and then the next leaders and the herd will stop their front feet, then their body, then the whole bunch. 

When you are out in front to stop their front feet, then you are in a position to step in any direction to create movement in the direction you want to point them, you are in position to point the nose of the animal where you want it to go and the feet and body will follow. 

It doesn’t take long if you are consistent and get the response that the animal understand what you are asking or needing, and they learn to respond to it easier and more consistently. 

This is how you get animals good to handle and not getting in the habit of ignoring the human for feed or going with other animals. They know that you know how to be in control. Very important. 

When you get animals to understand your approach to them that is not asking them to leave, by using flat angles with low energy towards the animal they learn to wait for you, just like a horse that’s good to catch. 

This allows you to look at the animals in a normal state that they show the true state of health and contentment. Then you can position yourself to create movement and start the lead to where you want to go. 

It’s very good to see animals get up and stretch and look at you. If when you approach the animals run off you have to catch up to get direction, and they are in a mindset to get away rather than respond to your pressure. This is much different than animals that learn through pressure and proper release of it. 

The other side is animals that run you over and won’t stop. This is what happens when you take the fence down or offer a treat. They get out of balance and your presence and pressure have no meaning. This is when you stop their front feet and make them wait, then turn them away and drive them to learn about responding to pressure. 

These are all very rewarding things for me, and I think for you as well. First of all for safety and profit. Second, the training of animals to respond to you has been such a spot of pleasure for the human, mostly with dogs and horses, but it might as well happen with your grazing animals as well. 

Here are a couple clips that might give you some ideas on helping achieving this. 

Stockmanship for Grazing

I’ve been grazing cattle for a long time, in lots of different climates and lots of different systems. Management of grazing has been around since biblical times, and even from different climates from brittle arid desert to wet jungle or irrigated pastures. 

Being able to control time of grazing, impact of grazing, and rest/recovery of roots and stem and leaf amount for faster recovery is what we are trying to achieve with a managed grazing program or system. 

Controlling movement of the animals is the main focus with grazing to achieve this. If you are using a machine to harvest it’s easy to control these things if the terrain allows it. 

Some topography doesn’t allow for the use of machines, and there is always expense involved with mechanical harvesting. 

With animals we can control movement with fencing, tethering animals or herding, usually at less expense. 

Labor can become a big expense.  An example is herding sheep. Most large sheep operations have herders in rough country that is to difficult to fence.  A band of sheep is usually around 1000 ewes. That’s 250 animal units.  It requires a herder that lives with the sheep full time and a camp tender to keep the herder in supply’s and moving camp to new feed. It is very nigh labor cost to animal units.  There are two things that are needed, herding animals for grazing management and predation control. A good herder creates their value by achieving high gains with content animals on good forage and low death loss from sickness and predators.  I’ve seen first hand on the same range, same sheep and same management and how the skills of the herder creating much better total weight of lambs weaned from one band to the next. 

As a grazing manager Stockmanship plays a crucial role. Gentle animals that are content in the environment, and not wanting to be somewhere else, that spend there time taking bites and feeding gut bugs, ruminating in a comfortable place and have good water availability will preform to the best of their genetic potential. 

This is so important to understand. If you break things down in the simplest forms of what an animal needs, it makes it easier to understand how important the stockmanship component is. 

To put is simple, gentle animals that are content get fat if they have appropriate nutrition. 

My young years were spent with cattle that always were wanting to be moved. My grandfather’s cattle were fat, but we didn’t get the most use of pasture because when the cows told my grandfather they wanted to move they got moved. They were content because they always got what they wanted. 

It was such a great thing for me to learn from, and helped me to have the desire to control the mind of animals to get the most from them, and give them the best quality of life. 

Gentle Cattle Get Fat

Grazing Right, Handling Right series

I want to do a series of clips of what I feel is important for proper grazing of animals from a Stockmanship point of view and increasing profit potential from the animals preforming at the best rate possible because of creating animals that graze in a way that keeps the gut full and healthy, and also animals that are content in the moment in the environment and pasture they are in. 

I want to start at the end. These steers are big, fat, gentle and handle real well in the pasture or corral. I hauled them to the sale, they stepped off the trailer calm, and I watched them sell on the internet and they walked in the ring calm and didn’t get bothered at all. 

They weighed more than I thought they would, 1093 average and they brought $311!

I really hope they can stay together through the finish and get to a yard that they can have the same quality of life they have had in my care. 

When you deal with large numbers it is much less personal.  When you don’t have many and know them personally from the time they are born you can get a little attached and really care about them. 

There is nothing wrong with that at all, and maybe we need to have the same feelings with larger numbers of animals. If you have an attachment to something you sure give them better care. 

I wanted to have areal nice easy gather and sort for these big guys on the last time I got to work them. Horse worked good, cattle handled nice, that’s why I like this so much!

This clip turned out to be a nice surprise. I put the camera on a gate post and the cattle had to come into the shot.  What I didn’t realize was the camera was filming our shadows. 

We rode home after getting them sorted and brought truck and trailer back and loaded them on foot. They worked great and loaded up calm and relaxed. 

Stay tuned to see how we graze and handle cattle in our paddocks and pastures to get cattle like this that get gentle and fat.