Chaos

There has been so much happening that I don' know where to start. So I guess I'll start with explaining this picture. The sheep are in the shearing yard waiting to be shorn, de-tailed, and castrated. The 2 steers are curious. Our 3rd steer is staying far, far away. I think he knows what's next.

What's next is cutting out the rams, non-producing ewes, fat ewes, etc. and 1 steer (the one that doesn't seem curious at all) and moving them down to the quarantine paddock where they wait for the home kill truck to come and turn them into dinners. Hopefully, a lot of dinners.

The sheep move placidly to their fate. So does our steer. One of our neighbors has decided to piggyback onto our home kill (a common practice; we've done it ourselves) so he wants to move a steer in with ours. Doesn't happen. His steer resents it - mightily - and Dan, the shearer, his dogs, and our neighbor all end up with 2 of the resentful steer's buddies in our paddock with him.

Dan is none too happy. The steer is "wild, very wild" and most of his morning has been spent trying to get him into the paddock. But worse lies ahead. The next morning Dan goes down to oversee the home kill (I never go near it; I want to enjoy my meat without the memories). He doesn't come back for, like forever. When he does, he is shaking he is so upset.

It turns out that the wild steer and his wild buddies broke down the paddock fencing, raced around terrifying our steer and  bolted out the paddock down the driveway, down the gravelled road and a full kilometre away to the main road. In the process they tear up some horse paddocks (Dan says the woman there was semi-hysterical and was not placated by his explanation that these weren't his steers). The home kill guy and his assistant were gamely racing around trying to help.

The neighbor had gone to work all unaware of the drama unfolding behind him. He was mortified when he heard about it but Dan was not into any blame game.  It wasn't his fault; it just happens. A wild steer is a fearsome thing and these had literally charged Dan and the home kill team. They finally got them back into the neighbor's paddock but it was too late for the home kill guy to do his thing. They couldn't manage to separate out our poor steer (Dan and Yael tried several times) and he was left bewildered and bleeding from the other steers' horns and the barbed wire.

Here is where a bit of explanation is needed. Yes, we raise the steers to be killed and eaten. They aren't pets, they're food. But, and it's a big BUT, we want them to have as good a life as possible while they are our responsibility. This means free ranging, never shutting them in dark, dank stalls, real grass to eat and fresh water to drink. We use no hormones, chemicals, etc. on them and generally speaking they are calm, gentle giants who die without any trauma. They literally never know what hit them. And that's the way we like it. So when a steer we raised from a youngster for over a year and half is mauled about like ours was, it is painful for us as well as him.

Dan wanted to take him back into our paddocks and let him recover but he was too beat up and so the home kill guy came back 2 days later and put him out of his misery. For those 2 days we tried vainly to get near him to assess his injuries, etc. but we could tell that it was just adding to his stress so we finally just went down there several times a day to be with him.

All in all, a very miserable week on the farm. And I'm not done yet. Stay tuned!