5th Day

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A day at the ranchand an amazing weather. This fifth day started by a fun stretch to group all these animals spread across the nearby field. It was a small field, only a couple of miles wide. That is fun how "quite" easily you can merge these cows together. This is really a herd mentality. Once gathered in the ranch coral, we started to sort the cows and the calves. That is a fun job! 352 cows go in one coral, 353 calves in the other one. Yes, it is not the same number and it is neither the one I said previously. We lost some calves and some cows. That is the game. They will either come to the ranch or go back to the starting point. Usually that is what happens, and that what the cowboys say. I trust them, but what a job. They will try to find the missing one, because a calf without his mother will starve and another cow will not feed him! They will deal with that later. Now the goal is to vaccinate all that little herd. The first step is to sort cows and calves in 2 big corals. This is quite fun… Just make them run in a narrow path and step in front of the calves to make them take a right turn to the calf coral and direct the cows straight to the big coral. We did pretty good as we only got 3 cows mixed with the calves. It was then quite easy to move them out. Once sorted, we would squeeze 14 calves plus 2 cowboys in a corner between two doors and the frenetic shots would start. Fill 4cc of vaccine in the syringe as fast as you can, hand over the syringe, get he empty one and fill it up. Do that 353 times! Each calf shot would be marked with a big pen in order to avoid shooting it a couple of times. On the other side of the ranch, we would do the same but with the cows. Of course, due to the size of that cows, we used an other system that would filter them one by one in a tiny corridor from where we could give them a shot and sort them. To finish this great day… it started to rain, hail, then snow! By 8pm 3 inches of snow were accumulated on the ground. What a beautiful scenery.

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