Thursday, June 20, 2013

The Joy of Raising Livestock

Jay Vogler describes a venture raising sheep that went awry.  Here's one bad day:
One year we were deep into mud season, after a good month of cold, wet snow. I was doing everything by myself, which is exhausting, and also pretty frantic. You end up forgetting to do things. So I was carrying some buckets out to the field and I was sure I had turned off the electric fence. But I had gone through a different entrance, kind of lost my bearings.
When I was a kid those fences were battery-operated; they’d give you a little zap. Me and my buddies would grab onto them for fun, try to trick tourists into doing it. Nowadays we’re talking like 8000 or 9000 volts. When I hit that fence, the electricity pulsed up through my arms and hit my chest like a baseball bat. I had to sit down.
I used to wear these fireman boots at the time. They were great because you could slip into them real easy. You could also slip right out of them.
So when I went to stand up, kind of disoriented, I stepped right out of my boots. We’ve got an extremely heavy clay soil here, no rocks to break it up. My foot sunk straight down six or eight inches into the mud, and I went flat on my face. I remember just laying there in the ice and mud, thinking, “This is the lowest I’ve gotten.”
I never accidentally ran into the electric fence, mainly because I've been too lazy to put one in (yet. Those cows are pissing be off undermining the fences, though, so I might zap them [and probably me]).  However, I've stepped out of my rubber boots a couple of times.  One winter evening, I stopped in to feed the cows before heading to the local pub to have a drink.  Unfortunately, my boots sank into the muck and as I tried to unstick my boot, my foot came out and sank into the muck, I lost my balance and fell face first into the mud/manure mix in front of me.  I didn't make it to town that night.  But I did get a pretty good laugh at my own expense.  Anyway, if one has livestock around, especially in the disorganized hobbyist way I do, lots of strange and funny things will happen.

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