wag the dog

One of the dairy cows has pink eye, so the plan for this afternoon was to herd the cows into a paddock with a squeeze chute, single the cow out, and rub medicine onto its eyeball. It’s harder than it sounds, even if it sounds relatively hard.

Here’s our team: Graham, Miva, me, Gayleen (Graham’s partner whom I’d met at Pujjis last month) and Wag, the huntaway dog. Huntaway dogs are herding dogs which control animals by barking rather than with eye contact like border collies.
The relevant herd was over in a far paddock. Graham asked Miva and Gayleen to stand over in the direction we wanted the cows to move, and keep them from going the wrong direction by moving around if the cows started to go astray (they apparently don’t like things, including people, in front of them) and making sure the right gates were open. Being a complete novice, my only job at the beginning was to follow Graham around and get pictures of the process, and move very quickly if he shouted any directions at me.

Lessons Learned: Cows, even small dairy cows, are very big, and big is scary when it appears to be coming straight at you. Cows can jump fences. Cows are loud. Cows are pretty smelly, especially when they are nervous. Cow herding requires a lot of trust in whoever is in charge, because otherwise there is no other reason to turn around, face oncoming cows, and stay still when, up until the last second, it doesn’t look like they’ll change their mind about where they’re going.

We got the medicine in the right cow (there was a little bit of a nervous moment for me when we thought the cow might not have been in this herd, and we’d have to do it all over again), and then moved all the cows back to their original paddock. I decided it had been a fun time after it was over and the cows were safely inside the paddock with no obvious reasons to jump the fence.