A lesson learned!

It seems that we are constantly learning lessons and sometimes we even learn them the hard way, a couple days ago I was helping my dad fill the freezer with beef and as I was doing that I thought about what happened for the meat to end up in the freezer, I'm going to share the lesson that we learned with you.



Trimming Table



The animal that ended up in the freezer was a two year old herd bull, 243W that we used on cows last year and were going to this year but that didn't turn out as planned. His feet were getting a bit long so we were going to trim them on our table. When 243W stepped out of the chute to enter the trimming table, he dropped down and died!

Scissor type head gate.

 Now we were puzzled on what could have happened, we have a scissor head gate and it is possible for an animal to go down in the head gate and then they pinch their necks, the jugular vein and then they can die, we have never had that happen before, if they do go down we release them immediately, so it didn't seem right for that being the cause of his death because it hasn't happened before and he was just standing there normal, no strain or anything!

So, we still needed an explanation for this unfortunate event. Now the trimming table is run on hydraulics and it was running, and it turns out there was a shortage in the cord somewhere and when that bull stepped out of the chute into the trimming table he was electrocuted! The interesting thing is that my dad stuck his hand a foot into the dirt and didn't feel a thing, which goes to show the senses of cattle and how the difference in weight makes such a big difference.

This was one of those incidents that you don't really hear of ever happening and if they do it's not very often, it was one of those very unfortunate events that you don't want to happen, but you learn that sometimes bad stuff happens and there's not much you can do about it!

We were able to get the bull packaged for meat and he filled a whole freezer. It was one of those sad situations that came about and needless to say we learned from it and now cords will be checked and hopefully it will never happen again!