Branding 2020

Last Saturday was the day for our second-ever Larson branding. It was an action-packed morning, and I’ll try to show you a little of how the process went.

First, a roper would catch the hind legs of a calf and drag him to the muggers.

The muggers would “restrain” the calf and hold him for the processing crew.

Abby was in charge of giving each calf two shots…

And she tried really hard not to inject the mugger by mistake. (That only happened once, and the mugger was very understanding;)

Each calf also received two “nasalgens” which is a vaccine that is given intranasally…or up the nose. Aunt Carolyn was in charge of this process. (P.S. Those are not needles on the end of her syringes but rather specialized plastic applicators.)

In the meantime, Jake…

Or Paulette would be busy filling the tagger…

To hand off to Ty who would run it to Marci who was in charge of putting a fly tag in each calf’s ear.

Then Ashton would come along and pour de-wormer/fly spray on each calf.

And finally, each calf would be branded and then turned back into the herd.

The whole process took no time at all, and often there were several calves to work on at the same time, so there was never a dull moment.

Plus, when we got close to the end, we went from roping hind legs to catch-as-catch-can and things got a little western. This head catch was particularly entertaining, and I wasn’t sure who was going to win there for a minute.

And once in a while, the calves would think it was great fun to take out a mugger. That could be pretty amusing, too.

But all in all, the morning went very smoothy and we were so thankful to everyone who helped.

Here are some more random pictures of our day.