Cattle: Branding
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ambience: Mooing
We’re at a ranch in Northern New Mexico. There’s a flurry of activity this time of years as they get the calves ready for spring and summer pasture. I’m Jim Metzner, and this is the Pulse of the Planet, presented by DuPont.
“Every year we gotta brand these baby calves when they’re about two or three months old, for identification and ownership.”
Carlos Cornay is a third-generation rancher. He says the hardest part of the branding process is getting five hundred pounds of feisty calf to stay put.
“You have to muscle it down, what you call flankin’ ’em. One’ll grab their front leg and the other the back leg, you just lift up on him and bring him down. And then you just hold him, while you get him worked on. And you burn the brand on him and then you put an ear mark and then you inoculate him. We vaccinate them for seven different diseases. So before we take ’em up to the high country, where we won’t see much of ’em all summer long, why they’ve got to be ready to stay healthy.”
Carlos’ daughter Maria Cornay Grandjean is part of the team of family, neighbors and friends that come by to help out branding each year.
“I’m a flanker. I take the head and I pull the leg back so that it doesn’t kick the brander. It’s easy when they’re down, it’s just gettin’ ’em there.”
That hissing sound you hear is a propane-fired branding iron.
“We have to brand our own cattle every year, like everybody else does. Our state brand laws are very, very rigid. It’s worse of a crime to steal a cow than it is, by golly, to kill a person sometimes.”
Pulse of the Planet is presented by DuPont, bringing you the miracles of science, with additional support provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities. I’m Jim Metzner.