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Published: October 5th 2014
Today was the most incredible day and I would definitely say one of the BEST DAYS OF MY LIFE! We had to go out into a 1300 acre pasture, find 200 cows and bring them back to the ranch. First of all, 1300 acres is an ENORMOUS stretch of land to find cows in! We first split up into two groups, and headed around on the outside of the land. We trotted up the hill and after about 30 minutes of so we began to find cows! In our teams we then began to split up again as we would find clusters of cows and begin herding them to the water point which was pretty much based in the centre. It was absolutely incredible, the hot sun beating down on us, absolute silence, enormous sky, limitless land, I felt SO free.
The freedom I felt whilst doing this was unreal, teamwork, alone with my horse, doing a job. Just look at the photos, they do not do it justice!
This took us a good couple of hours to do, we then bought them back to the farm and put them into the arena. We then had to cut the
cows. This meant that we put about 1/4 of the cows into a smaller pen and began to cut the mothers away from their calves. We all had a go at doing this, it was great fun to do but also in the back of my mind was thinking about what we were actually doing.
The calves get taken away and put onto other farms to be fattened up for the next 9 months. They then go to be slaughtered for meat, the mothers continue to have calves, they can have up to have 6 in their lifetime. We helped put the calves onto the big trucks, it was really humbling to watch. I really believe that people need to know what goes on so they know how beef gets onto their plate, and then make a conscious choice to eat it or not. It was really quite harrowing seeing the calves absolutely terrified, battling to not get onto the trucks and then being taken away. The pens they go to be are small.
Once the calves were taken away the mothers were let back out into the pasture, they hung around and will hang around the ranch
for a further 3-4 days, wondering where their babies have gone. The sound was SO loud, of constant mooing, really eerie.
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