University Place

Design of Humane Animal-Handling Facilities

[Tom Zinnen, Outreach Specialist, Biotechnology Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison]

Welcome everyone to Wednesday Nite @ The Lab, I’m Tom Zinnen. I work here at the U.W.-Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for U.W.-Extension Cooperative Extension. And on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers, Wisconsin Public Television, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the U.W.-Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite @ The Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year.

Tonight, it’s my pleasure to introduce to you Dave Kammel, he’s with the College of Ag and Life Sciences and the Biological Systems Engineering Department there. He’s also with U.W.-Extension Cooperative Extension. He’ll be talking about design and management of humane animal-handling facilities.

Dave was born in Coon Valley, Wisconsin over in Vernon County. He went to Westby High School, spent a couple years at U.W.-Eau Claire and then came down to U.W.-Madison where he finished up his bachelors and also got his PhD back in about 1985. He’s been with the Department of Ag Engineering, now called Biological Systems Engineering ever since, and along with that as I mentioned, he works for U.W.-Extension Cooperative Extension.

Tonight, as part of our second round of talks in June dairy month, we get to hear about cattle handling facilities and how to make them more humane, both for the cattle and for the humans. Please join me in welcoming Dave Kammel to Wednesday Nite @ The Lab.

[David Kammel, Livestock Housing Specialist, University of Wisconsin-Extension]

Thank you.

Thank you.

So, this is probably – I watch Wednesday Nite @ The Labs, and I think this is probably gonna be a little bit different than most of the lectures I listen to. I don’t have lots of data, I don’t have lots of charts, I don’t have lots of graphs. I have a lot of pictures, and I want to show you a little bit about what I do. And most of my work in the U.W.-Extension and Cooperative Extension is working with the county offices, all the county agricultural agents who are also faculty. When they get a farmer question related to some type of facility question, design, ventilation from dairy cattle, beef cattle; I do goats, I do sheep, you know, any kind of critter that’s out there. I’ve had sheep. Pheasant questions, rabbit questions, rodent questions. Usually, the rodent questions are how to get rid of them.

[laughter]

But – [laughs] bird – bird questions. So – so, I’m going to kind of go through this as if I was talking to you as farmers, as people in the industry, because that’s what I, when I asked to do this presentation, it was actually at an animal well-being and welfare conference about a month or so ago that we had over in Platteville area.

It’s become a more visible part of agriculture, certainly. And as an animal ag engineer, agricultural engineer, I dont – I didn’t know necessarily a lot about animal behavior. I had to train myself over the years to deal – to understand the animals that I’m trying to design facilities for and help other people, other farm – farmers, understand the animals that sometimes they think they know very well, but sometimes they don’t.

So, I guess the – the title –

[slide titled – What is your definition of humane cattle handling?]

– when I was asked to do it originally was talking about humane facilities. So, I- I kind of looked it up, just looked at a couple of different references –

[the slide animates on the following bulleted list – kind or gentle to animals; marked by compassion, sympathy, or consideration for humans or animals; acting in a manner that causes the least harm to people or animals]

– kind or gentle to animals; marked by compassion, which I think is a good term and related to humane; sympathy or consideration for humans or animals. Or in this case, I’m also dealing with people and animal interaction. So, sometimes what’s humane for animals or humans isn’t necessarily the – the same thing, and we have to figure out what that – what that balance is. Acting in a manner that causes the least harm to people or animals, so that’s stress. And that’s in some people’s minds, stress.

You know, again, I’ve learned through other people lots of different animal behaviorists out there. Probably the most famous would be Temple Grandin, if you’ve heard of her or read any of her books. I’ve read all of her materials; I’ve heard her several times.

[David Kammel, on-camera]

Autistic, you know? She had – has the ability, and I remember her as a young student in college dealing with pig toys. She did a research project on pig toys. How – where pigs are biting tails because of aggression and stress. She found out, you know, if we put a bowling ball or a tire or something in that pen and let the pigs kind of play with that instead of taking it out on their neighbors, that might help the pigs, right? So, but she’s a person with autism that has been able to explain to us – us without autism how animals may behave or – or how they perceive the world.

Generally, that’s by vision, right? She’s a very visual person. She thinks in pictures. And I – I do a lot of work with drawings and sketches and, you know, communicate via drawings and sketches to help other people understand the visual context of what we’re trying to get across when we’re designing a facility.

So, my first question usually to –

[slide with a photo of two farmers trying to inseminate a cow that is tied to a pole]

– a group of farms that are working with animals is, how many here have a cattle handling facility that consists of a rope and a post?

Okay, it’s a very simple system. [laughs] Most people have those items on the farm. And, in a lot of cases, I’ve experienced this with – on my father’s farm, and I’ve been on farms where this is the cattle handling facility, a rope and a post. You have the animal tied to some barrier, and you’re trying to do something with that animal that she doesn’t necessarily want to be done anything to.

I have had an opportunity over the last 10 years to visit some European Eastern Bloc countries. This is actually in Belarus. That was my first assignment. I – I went over as a U.S.A.I.D. farmer-to-farmer consultant trying to help them with democracy but, basically, with agriculture, how to become a modern agriculture, if you will, and – and deal with modern agricultural practices.

And in Belarus, what the farms that you see in the background, actually was under new construction, was an old collective farm. So, back in the collective days everybody was part of the collective and they shared in the collective. As things changed from a communist society to a market, economic market, generally, in their dealings with business, now those collectives became owned or purchased by possibly a director or somebody in power that had the money to purchase it, and now they hire who used to be the collective people to work that dairy.

But, also, they might have – in the collective days, you had cows in the collectives, but you also had your family cow. Your family cow supplied you with milk, cheese, meat. Another animal, you get it bred. Belarus there’s no, it’s illegal to own a bull. They have to do everything by artificial insemination. But not every family – family cow and –

[David Kammel, on-camera]

– family that has a cow is an artificial inseminator, right? They’ve – theyve never been trained to do it. They don’t have a bull handy to just let loose with the cow. So, they have to bring the family cows to the local collective now or local dairy that’s increasing its size and hire their inseminator and insemination done here. So, this gentleman is trying to inseminate this – this man’s cow. It’s an important task because if you don’t inseminate the cow and she doesn’t have a calf, she doesn’t produce milk, and if she gets old enough, she’s probably going to be a culled cow.

So, it took about four or five turns around the post –

[slide featuring a photo of the same two farmers trying to inseminate a cow taken from a different angle]

– before she finally could get cinched up enough and they could restrain her to the point where this man could do his bit – do his job with artificial inseminating this cow.

So, dangerous for the cow –

[David Kammel, on-camera]

– dangerous for the people, the person holding the cow, dangerous for that man with his arm in the cow. You know, if you talk – had anybody who knows vets, you – you can talk to them about their rotator cuff damage that’s happened over years and years of inseminating many, many cows.

So, let’s start from the scratch: reasons for handling facility.

[slide titled – Reasons for Handling Facility – featuring the following bulleted list – Conduct necessary health and management practices; Safety – People – injuries costs money; stress costs money; Safety – Cattle – injuries costs money; stress costs money; Time – your time; the vets time]

We have to conduct necessary health and management practices on a farm. Whether it be a beef cow farm or a dairy cow farm. Of course, there’s a lot of dairy cows in Wisconsin. That’s the majority of the people I work with, but I have a lot of farms that are retired dairy farmers and still want cattle on their farm that have moved from being a dairy farmer to a beef farmer. And sometimes that jump is very difficult for them because they’re used to working with dairy cows.

Now, if you think of a dairy cow, it’s usually thought of as a very docile, kind, easy – easy to walk to, you know? Something that you can come up – come up and hug. Okay? In fact, they’ll usually come up and hug you or lick you or, you know, be – want to be by you. That’s a bit different than some breeds of Angus or Herefords or beef cows that aren’t used to being run up to and hugged. They’re used to be possibly out on a range with only fences holding them in. It depends on if you’re in Wisconsin or out west. If it’s out west, they’re probably on range without fences.

Safety, for people. I have a lot of people that get injured working with cattle because they don’t have the facilities to restrain the animal –

[David Kammel, on-camera]

– properly and are doing some-something that they’re always at risk of getting injured and all of a sudden are injured. Stress costs money on people. You lose your temper, you lose, you know, stress. You get injured, you’re gonna – youre gonna get hurt. And injured is going to cost you something. Insurance costs, hospital costs.

Cattle. Injuries cost money in cattle. If you sell animals and you have a – a bruised animal, you’re going to get docked on that animal. You’re going to lose price on that animal. If you have a cut or anything that’s damaging that animal, thats when – when they’re slaughtered, somebody’s going to be checking and inspecting those animals to determine how were they treated, and if they were treated badly and an accident happened, that animals not worth as much.

Stress can actually cost money just to the fact it’s stress. They may not have been injured, but they’ve been under stress, they’ve been shipped for eight or 10 hours. They have no water, no food for that time period, okay? And when they come to the yard, if they’re held any much longer, they’re probably going to lose some weight, and you’ve lost money.

It costs time. Your time. If it takes twice as long to do the job because you don’t have the facilities to do it properly or efficiently or effectively, you’re going to lose time. The vet’s time is – is important because the farmers are paying for that time, okay? The vets now basically have to charge kind of when they leave the office. It’s going to be a trip charge. It’s going to be, How long does it take me to be on this farm to do that work? And, if it takes six hours versus two hours, there’s going to be a bigger bill. And so, many farms are, you know, very sensitive to that fact.

So, another question I usually ask –

[slide titled – Reasons for Handling Facility – with the following list – How many here have been injured while handling cattle? And – How many here have been docked for injuries to cattle?]

– farms: how many here have been injured by an animal on the farm? I – I may not get 100% of an audience that’s – thats farmer that’s been injured by an animal, but it’s 95% probably. Now, injury – what’s an injury? Stepped on foot. Broken arm. You know, a bruise. Banged up, you know, against the gate. Just bowled –

[David Kammel, on-camera]

– or, you know, either bowled by a bull or bowled by an animal. And we still, every once in a while, read articles where somebody’s killed by a bull on a dairy farm or a beef farm. It still happens. We know there’s risks there, and it’s just that kind of disconnect between making sure I don’t get in the same pen with the bull when it’s acting a little off. And it never happened to me before, is usually the – answer of that person that had an accident working with a bull or was killed by a bull. Never – never caused a problem before. Or most of the time they figured out, Eh, it’s time to get rid of that bull, right? They learn when it’s time. Sometimes that’s not soon enough, okay?

So, you know, how many have been injured, how many have been docked? Most farms recognize when they’ve been docked at a sale barn.

I’m going to talk a little bit about design. So, as an ag engineer, I’m dealing with specific information, details of design. It’s also a process that I try and work through the people I’m working with. And most of my questions, actually I would say the majority of the last year’s questions, or the last several years’ questions are actually, most of the time with beef farmers, are the fact that they weren’t beef farmers or cattle farmers or, excuse me, they were – were dairy farmers, now they’re beef farmers. And they don’t have the facilities that they used to have – they had – they need for handling beef cattle versus dairy cattle. And we’ll talk a little bit about some of the restraints and different systems that are the difference between dairy and beef.

But we have to develop a management plan.

[slide titled – The Design Process – followed by the following list – Develop the cattle handling management pan; Investigate and develop alternative designs on paper (these two are labelled Change Design); Evaluate alternatives and options; Choose the best system design; Troubleshoot and implement the design (these last three are labelled Iterate Design)]

In my title, I talk about design and management. And they need to be together. They need to be both at the same table. We can’t have one without the other. We can have great design and poor management cause people don’t understand how to use that system properly. And we can have use – a lot of times, more often than not, very little design or little – little facility to work with, and they’re trying to work around what they have with a different way of managing that animal. Sometimes that just takes too much time, cause a lot of farms become successful beef farmers as retired dairy farmers, find out when they were working 10 cattle with that system that was fine on a weekend night, no big deal. Now they got 50-head of cattle and they got to do it on a weekend night, and the vet’s not so interested in coming with that same set of facilities to work 50 cattle as he might have been when he only had 10 cattle. So, farmers grow, farms grow.

So, we look at alternatives. We put something down on paper. You know, just a simple communication device of a sketch or a drawing or a scale drawing, taking designs from a variety of sources that are out there, use something that’s proven, integrated into some other facility, into the facilities that they have on the site.

We have to evaluate those options, and – and generally, I’ll maybe run a couple of different options or a couple of different ways that we could do this to let the producer understand what they could do and what would be preferential to – to their needs.

At some point we have to choose a design. Whatever the best design is, we’ll call it –

[David Kammel, on-camera]

– because we can’t just keep going round and round and iterate the design over and over again and never come to a decision point where – where the farmer has to de-decide what they’re going to build.

So, and then we troubleshoot. A lot of times some of the design is just troubleshooting. Troubleshooting the design that’s already there. It’s not quite working the way we thought it was, or cattle aren’t doing what we thought they should be doing. Why is that? How – how do we determine why that’s happening? So, we can either iterate the design or we might have to change the design.

So, what’s a – a management plan? It’s really just a list. I – I tell farmers it’s not that complicated.

[slide titled – Develop a Cattle Handling Management Plan (on paper) – with the following list – Define activities that need to be performed – restraint for treatments, sorting, loading/unloading, weighing; Define number and type of cattle to be treated; List needs (and wants) of the owner; determine features that meet these needs and (wants); prioritize the list of features; develop a sketch of what you have now]

We just have to kind of start listing things that you want. What do you want? What do you have to do with the animal? Well, in most cases, most farms have to restrain the animal at some point in its life, or probably several times in its life, for treatments of some sort. For cattle, when we have a cow/calf operation where we have babies next to mothers and we have to ween them away from the mothers at some point, we might have to sort them.

We’re always moving cattle. Either cattle are coming to the farm to start their life or cattle are being loaded away from the farm towards the end of their life. We might have to weigh animals just to be able to understand what’s their average daily gain? Are they making money? Is it – is it profitable for them?

We have to know what kind of animals we’re working with. And we’ll talk a little bit about the different types of animals. I mentioned kind of differences in general between beef and dairy. But within beef breeds there’s differences between, in – in a breed there’s differences between adults and – and babies and young cattle. So, we have to know kind of the size and scale of that operation. Is it a hobby, 10 cows and never will be any more than 10 cows, or is this a growing operation? You know, somebody became successful. I’ve got some clients that are Scottish Highlander farmers, which is a breed of cattle that you might have eaten in a restaurant in Madison, okay? Locally sourced animal that’s raised out on the pasture out in a grazing, more of a browser. You know, has anybody seen a Scottish Highlander? What do they have that most other –

[David Kammel, on-camera]

– animals don’t have?

[Several audience members, off-camera]

Big horns.

[David Kammel, on-camera]

Big horns, okay? [laughs]

[indicating the length of both his arms outstretched]

Horns that go out quite a ways, okay?

So, you deal – you deal with, you know, why do dairy cows not have horns? It’s because they’re mingled with a lot of other cows, and they can injure each other with – when they’re that confined – when theyre in confinement and hurt each other. So, we take the horns off. Or we poll the animals. Like beef breeds have, basically, polled genetics, which means they aren’t born with horns, to limit the likelihood that they’re going to injure each other.

We look at needs and wants of the owner. We look at features. You know, we need to do this. Here’s a feature, a specification on a – on the design that would allow you to do that.

We prioritize that list, and we develop a sketch. Prioritization generally is because of budget. I – I usually ask farmers, Is money no object? And most farmers say, “Well, yeah, money is an object.” Okay? [laughs]

[laughter]

We can’t just buy everything. We have to, you know, were gonna frug – we have to be frugal about this. So, you get systems that are partially built – home-built, can do it with sweat equity. There might be pieces and parts that are more appropriate to buy because it would take more effort and cost to build your own squeeze chute than to buy a manufactured squeeze chute that’s gone through some iterative design in it – in itself and know the – know how it works and what is – what can be improved on it. So, it’s always a continual improvement.

[slide titled – Treatments on Animals – featuring three subheadings and a bulleted list underneath each – Herd Health – vaccinate, medicate, examination, surgery, weigh, clip, dock tails, observation, dehorn, and hoof trimming; Animal I.D. – ear tags, branding, and implants; Reproduction – heat detection, insemination, pregnancy checking, synchronizing, palpate, and calve]

Treatments on animals. Generally, I kind of break it into about three areas. One is herd health. We vaccinate animals. We medicate animals when they’re sick. We may have to examine an animal. We may have to do surgery on animal – on an animal. Dairy cows may – may have, at times, what they call a displaced abomasum where the stomach twists, and it’ll kill them if they dont – if you can’t do the surgery to untwist the stomach. If you’re a show cattle and you run – if you go to the county fairs, you’re going to see kids clipping cattle, just dressing them up. We – we dock tails still. Although, I think that’s probably something that will go away in the next five to 10 years, I’m pretty sure, because it’s found – been found with science from people in dairy science here in Madison and other research that’s been done over the years. The main reasons that farms thought they needed to dock tails was to keep the cattle clean so that they didn’t contaminate the udder, which meant you contaminated the milk when you were harvesting milk and you’d have a high somatic cell count. Most of the research has shown that’s not true. You don’t need to dock tails to have clean milk. There are other things we can do in management, and cows can keep their tails.

Observation. She doesn’t look right. We just need to kind of restrain her. We need to kind of keep an eye on her. Maybe she’s sick or just getting sick and maybe we can prevent her getting sicker if we kind of keep track of her. We still do dehorn. Dehorning means taking the horn off, and there is man-, again, management is changing, in dairy cattle anyway, to say, Well, we try and do this before the horn forms, which is – is called disbudding. If we can do some –

[David Kammel, on-camera]

– kind of treatment and many – most of that is what – what they call a paste. It’s a – its a abrasive – or a paste that basically burns, chemically burns, the bud of the horn before it starts forming. We can medicate the – the calf to reduce the pain when that happens. And we can get it done very early so that they won’t have to go through the pain and medication of dehorning. That’s, again, one of these things that will evolve. It’s evolved already. You know, farms that dehorned five years ago now disbud cause they change their management practices. There are still farms that probably dehorn where they have to actually saw the horn off, and that’s pretty traumatic. Okay?

Hoof trimming. Cattle are trimmed, their hooves are trimmed when they –

[return to the – Treatment on Animals – slide with the bulleted lists]

– get too long, and we need to make sure they’re walking right so they don’t go lame. Animal identification. Basically we got to put a tag in the ear so we know what animals are so we can tell, you know, when we started looking at where your food comes from, to be able to track back to a specific farm at a specific town at a specific address that that animal was born there or was moved from there to slaughter, for example, and we found out there was a – a problem with that meat. So branding, implants.

Reproduction is another major part of beef cattle/dairy cattle production is we have to detect heats. We have to be able to inseminate. We have to be able to check their pregnancy. We have to – we may synchronize, which means –

[David Kammel, on-camera]

– basically, using hormones to synchronize when the cows will breed or are ready to breed. We may palpate to basically check either for an injury or a calf in the cow to make sure it’s in the right location or that there is a calf there. And then we – we eventually calf that cow. We have a place where an animal can calf the cow in a clean environment.

So, the – the system is just a tool. It’s to implement your plan. It’s there to protect the people.

[slide titled – Cattle Handling System is a too – with the following list – to implement your management plan and protocols; to protect you; to protect your animals; to save you time]

It’s to protect the animals, and hopefully save time.

[new slide titled – Cattle Senses – Vision – with the following bulleted list about vision – it is their dominant sense and 50% of their sensory information; they have binocular vision for limited area in front of them, 25-50 degrees, they lower their head and face stimulus; they have monocular vision in the remaining visual field, 330 degrees and have limited ability to judge depth or distance; they have a blind spot directly behind them; they are sensitive to high contrast of light and dark, shadows look like a hole; they tend to move from low light to more light and avoid moving toward a low light area]

So, let’s just go through a little bit on somewhat on the humane side. One of the humane things is, well, we got to understand the critter a little bit. And I just started, you know, summarizing some of the information that’s out there in general. Their dominant sense is vision. 50% of their sensory information is coming just from sight. They have binocular vision for a limited area in front of them. So, we’re talking about cattle now. Now 25 to 50 degrees. They can see really well right here. They can see, but they can’t see very well below the level of their eyes. One – Curt Pate, a very famous stockman, explained it this way –

[David Kammel, on-camera]

– to a group, and I – I took it, I – I thought it was very interesting. And something that people can relate to is that if you [puts his hands out horizontally under his eyes] put your hands below your eyes and you decide you’re going to walk down some steps or walk up that thing, what are you going to do when you want to go somewhere? I’m just not – just not going to start walking blindly. I’ll walk off the ledge, right? I’m going to lower my head, right? I’m going to look down. And if you’ve seen cattle, when you watch cattle move, you see them all the time looking down, just kind of surveying, swinging their head, trying to see what’s in front of them.

Now, they have really good vision [spreads his arms out wide and a little bit behind him] all around them except [makes a swimming motion with his arms] right directly behind them. So, they – they have a much wider peripheral vision than we do. [hold his arms out straight] We can probably have 180-200 degrees, maybe. I can see my tips of my hands. [moves his arms back] Cattle can see all the way back here. Why is that? Theyre – theyre – what – what are cattle to every – any other animal that’s in above them in the food chain? They’re prey, right? They’re food, right? And they’ve – theyve learned that. That’s something they’ve learned over the years, millennia. They’re food. So again, we got to think of when cattle behave, they behave because they’re a prey animal. They’re – theyre also a herd animal. It’s safety in herds, in a group. It’s – its making sure we see out in the distance that possible threat.

They do have a blind spot directly behind them. And when we’re moving cattle, where are the people usually? Directly behind them. Okay? I got cows all the way up there. I got 20 cows between me and here, and even the last cow, I’m right behind her. She doesn’t know I’m there, except if I’m yelling or whistling or screaming, and we’ll get to that in a second.

They’re sensitive to high contrast of light and dark.

[return to the – Cattle Senses – Vision – slide]

A shadow can look like a hole to them. In fact, some work done by Temple Grandin showed that you can actually design a system without gates or fence by just creating dark spaces on either side of that animal, and she will not cross that if she does – unless she’s forced to because the doesn’t want to walk in that hole. She wants to walk where she can see, where it’s light. They tend to move from low light to more light and avoid moving towards the light. So again, a lot of the issues sometimes in handling facilities is it’s just uneven light. There’s really dark inside the building, it’s really light outside, and we’re trying to move an animal from the outside into the inside. And, again, it just looks like a big, dark hole to them. So –

[new slide titled – Visual Sense – featuring an illustration of a cow taken from above with the cow at a 45-degree angle and a circle around the cow labelled Edge of Flight Zone. At the bottom of the slide at the end of another 45-degree angle from the center of the cow to the bottom of the circle is labelled Point of Balance. So, from the front of the cow to the point of balance is 90-degrees. 45-degrees from the point of balance toward the back of the cow is a triangular area labelled A and B (A in the front in the flight zone, B at the back outside the flight zone) – this triangle is labelled Handler Position – A to Start Movement, B to Stop Movement. Also at the back of the cow is another triangle representing the cows Blind Spot]

– we just have to think about that.

So, I mentioned there are visual senses here. Here’s their blind spot [indicating with the mouse pointer the area labelled Blind Spot on the illustration] kind of right directly behind them. We’ll get into the flight zone [using the mouse pointer to trace the circle in the illustration] in a second, but when we’re moving animals, we basically show, make sure the animal can see us, first off [using the mouse pointer to indicate the Handler Position on the illustration] , and then we decide that we’re either going to be an A or B. A is within their flight zone, which will tend to make them move forward, in this case, because we’re behind their balance point, or point of balance they call it, which is basically right at the shoulder of the – the animal, this balance point. If we’re in front of this point, moving this way, we’re going to tend to make her turn and move away. If we’re behind that balance point and move within her flight zone, she’s going to tend to move forward. So, a lot of training now on dairy farms is making sure people don’t walk directly –

[David Kammel, on-camera]

– behind the cows. They walk side to side, or they approach the animals from the side when they’re working that animal in a pen or in a group.

If you want to move her but yet make her stop, and what Curt Pate calls that, that’s a – thats a – excuse me [clears his throat] – that’s a benefit to the animal. That’s a treat to the animal. I’m going to let her. She moved for me, step back. She – she – it reinforces the fact that I made her move, but now I released her. Okay? And she understands that while there’s no more pressure, I’m comfortable with you being that close. If you take one step forward, I might move. If I take – take a step back, I will stop. And sometimes you need to make them stop, okay? You don’t want to always force them, if theyre – especially if they’re going in the wrong direction.

A lot of this is coming – going – getting developed in what they call B.Q.A., Beef Quality Assurance, which is basically protocols and standards for farms to follow to make sure animals are treated properly at the farm so when they come through to be a food item, they – they have been treated as well as we can make them be treated as a food animal.

Hearing. So, their hearing is they have a wider range of hearing. They can hear high pitched sounds.

[slide titled – Cattle Senses – Hearing – featuring the following bulleted list under the title, Hearing – Wider range of hearing – humans = 64-23,000 Hz, Cattle = 23-35,000 Hz; Cattle have difficulty in locating origin of sound – use sight to determine origin; Cattle stressed with – high pitched sounds such as whistling, high volume such as shouting, sudden, loud, intermittent noises; Cattle can be calmed with – Music]

They can hear low pitched sounds much better than humans. So, what – what we may not hear, they may hear. Okay? We can usually sense where that sound is coming from. We have a pretty good sense of, that noise came over from there or that noise came from there. Cattle don’t have that as – as good of perception there. They don’t know where the noise came from. It could be behind them. If its from – if they think it’s from behind them, what are they going to do? They’re going to move away from it. If they think it’s in front of them, they’re going to move forward. But the first thing is they’re confused. They don’t know where it’s coming from. So, what do they do? They hear a noise, now they’re going to start looking around. They’re going to see, Okay, my vision tells me that sound is – was – was out there and that’s not a good thing cause that’s a wolf and I don’t want to talk to that wolf.

When we think about stress, what we talked about with not being humane: high pitched sounds, whistling, high volume sounds, shouting, sudden loud intermittent noises. Gates banging, cattle –

[David Kammel, on-camera]

– hitting gates and clanging. So, when we think about the old way of what you saw when you see the Westerns and they’re moving cattle, what were they usually doing to the cattle? They’re whistling at them. They’re slapping their [hits the side of his pants with his hand] ropes. They have – they might even have a slap to make a slap. So, it will move them, okay? But it’ll also stress them. Okay? And I – I guess I relate this mainly to what – what we see on the Westerns, and we take to a dairy farm, and you’re doing – trying to do the same thing on a dairy farm when the cattle are in confined pen. There’s not a lot of options in a, versus the open range, of moving away from that sound or where they’re going to move. They’re going to get into a gate. They’re going to get into a stall. They’re going to get into a – a fence, if they can’t move freely.

So, what we’ve learned again on dairy farms is calm, quiet, use your body to – to direct the cattle. Talk to them. Cattle can be calmed with music. How many here grew up on a dairy farm or was in a dairy stall barn, and what was usually playing when – when you were milking?

[Female Audience Member, off-camera]

The radio.

[David Kammel, on-camera]

The radio was playing, usually. What was – what kind of music was playing?

[Female Audience Member, off-camera]

Generally, Country/Western.

[David Kammel, on-camera]

Country/Western or polka. [laughs] I grew up with polka. But – but any kind of music. You know, they – they – you know, if it’s not too loud and it’s soothing, they actually like music.

So, smell. They’re very sensitive to smells.

[slide titled – Cattles Senses – Smell – that features a bulleted list under the heading Smell – Sensitive; Select feed based on smell; Detect odors several miles away; Detect stressed animals and social order; Not only nose but also roof of their mouth; Reproduction (sense females in heat)]

They will smell their feed, and if they – smells funny, they’re not going to eat it. Theyre gonna detect – they can detect odors several miles away or down, you know, from the other end of the pen. If it’s not very good feed on one end of the pen and better feed on the other – on the opposite pen, they are probably going to move to the better smelling feed. They can detect other animals. They use smell to detect other animals in their social order. So, pheromones are basically released. They also use the roof of their mouth. If you – and this is probably most evident in reproduction with bulls. Bulls with basically open their mouth and kind of lick the air. They’re trying to draw in those – those scents. That, Which – which beauty do I want to go talk to? Reproduction, you know, we smell heats and – and senses the females that are in heat for breeding.

[new slide titled – Cattle Senses – Taste and Touch – featuring this bulleted list under Taste – Sweet, salty, bitter, acidity; Sensitive – 2 to 3 times more taste buds than humans, novel or new food. And under the heading Touch is this list – Temperature; Use mouth to explore]

Taste and touch. They’re kind of lower – on the lower end. They can taste the four – these four areas: sweet, salt, bitter, acidity. They’re very sensitive. They have more taste buds than we do. They – novel and new food is going to be a – a challenge for farms. They know – farms know if they switch a feed, that that may not be a feed that that animal’s –

[David Kammel, on-camera]

– going to take. So, what they have to do sometimes is mask it. They have to either, if they have to change feeds, they’re going to do it over a gradual time, over a couple of weeks maybe, before they – they – so the animal just quit and don’t quit eating.

Touch. You know, they’re -theyre sensitive to the – their whole body is. Their skin, we got a lot of surface area for temperature, touch, and – and senses of touch. They use their mouth and their tongue to explore. When theyre – they have nothing else to explore with except their mouth and their tongue. That’s usually me or somebody else on a farm when I’m in a pen or they’re going to sense a gate or another – or another animal.

So, when – how do we integrate that behavior to system design? We got to remember they’re a prey species. They’re also herd animals and prefer to move in a group. So, when we’re moving animals, we prefer to move a group of animals together because they feel safe. Cattle are stressed when separated and isolated.

[slide titled – Integrating Cattle Behavior in Handling System Design – with the following list – Cattle are a prey species; Cattle are herd animals and prefer to move in a group; Cattle are stressed when separated and isolated; Cattle want to follow herd mates; Cattel are less expressive of pain than humans; Calm, quiet handling with minimal distractions; Cattle memory – bad experiences, escape routes]

The worst thing for an animal to be is to try and separate one animal from this group, within this pen, we’ll call it, and keep that one animal over there and the rest of them over here. What’s that one animal want to do? It wants to get back to that group, okay? And that’s where you’re in between, you have to do, you know, that’s what you have to try and manage.

Cattle don’t express pain very well. That’s probably, again, something if you watched National Geographic or other herd anything about great, large herds is herd animals do not express pain because that’s just an indication to the predator, That’s the one I pick out. That’s the one that’s over there alone. They’re not going to go alone and feel sick. They’re going to try and stay within their group or try and be in the middle of the group. So, quiet, quiet, calm handling within minimal distractions.

Cattle do have memories. Usually, they remember the bad things much better than they remember the good things. So, we have to, you know, when –

[David Kammel, on-camera]

– we’re working with milking parlors for example, we want to encourage the farm to make it a very, very pleasant experience to walk into the milking parlor and be milked. We don’t want to be switch – pushing them, hitting them, doing whatever we need to get them in there because we got to milk them because that’s just going to be a bad experience they’re going to remember the next time they go to the milking parlor and we gotta do that two or three times a day. That’s going to be frustrating for the people, especially. And it’s not the cattle’s fault. It was our fault because we didn’t think about that.

Cattle prefer to see where they’re going. They move away from something they feel pressure from. That might be people, it might be gates. A handler moving in the opposite direction of the flow of cattle encourages forward movement.

[a new slide continuing the heading – Integrating Cattle Behavior in Handling System Design – with the list continuing – Cattle prefer to see where they are going; Cattle move away from something they feel pressure from; Handler moving opposite the flow of cattle in an alley encourages forward movement of cattle; When blocked cattle want to return from where they came; Visual barriers to limit distractions or enhance visual response]

I’ll show you in a little picture in a bit. When blocked, cattle will want to return where they came from. If I take them into a dead-end alley and there’s no place to go, their – their inclination is to, I want to get away in – into a safer space and that’s back where I came from. Visual barriers can limit distractions or enhance visual response. Sometimes we want solid fence to minimize distractions so that they don’t see outside activities that might distract them. Sometimes we want them open because we want them to respond to our direction, our movement, our body movement.

[return to the illustration of the cow as seen from above within a circle, with the Blind Spot, Handler Position, Point of Balance, and Edge of Flight Zone indicated – the illustration now has the title – Flight Zone]

So, we talked about that handler position before. That flight zone. Different flight zones for different animals. This flight zone for a show cow at the county fair is probably zero. It’s right up against her body cause she’s got people around her. She’s used to people. Even strangers being up against her and touching her and fond – petting her.

Range cattle. That might be 30 feet or 40 feet or 100 feet because they just don’t want to be associated –

[slide titled – Flight Zones and Handling – featuring this bulleted list – Range cattle different than confinement cattle; Beef cattle different than dairy cattle; Breed differences; Calves, Heifers, Cows have different; Back out of an animals flight zone to calm her down; If/when she turns to face you, you are out of her flight zone]

– with humans. So, range cattle are different than confinement cattle, certainly. Beef cattle are different than dairy cattle.

[David Kammel, on-camera]

Breed differences within the cattle breeds. Calves, heifers, cows all are different. Back out of an animal’s flight zone. Basically, when we put – come into her person – some people call it personal space – it’s not a person, so we call it a flight zone because it’s not an ani – its not a person, it’s an animal’s space. So, you know, sometimes we still have this issue of trying to humanize cat -animals. They’re not humans. They’re animals. And, you know, so, backing out of their flight zone will calm her down. Push – walking into her flight zone may agitate her. If – again, just learning from people that do this as a live – for a living or teach other people to do it for a living, is in order – for you to understand that animal recognizes where you’re at, if she turns her head and looks at you, she – she knows shes – she knows you’re okay. Okay? She knows you’re there. That’s as far as I want you to be from me. I’m okay with that.

If – if you walk into that space, the tendency is then she’s going to turn her head away, and she’s going to move away from you. So, just watching the animal’s eyes, watching the animal’s ears is another indication of how people have learned to move animals without a lot of extra effort.

[slide titled – Moving cattle using the balance point – featuring an illustration of three cattle lined up in a pen as seen from above. There is a dotted line across each of the cattle about a third of the way back from their heads (near their shoulders) labelled Point of Balance. Above the pen illustration is a triangle made of movements – at the bottom of the triangle are three arrow pointing to the back of the cattle and is labelled Path to move the Animals Forward. On the hypotenuse of the triangle is a single arrow facing to the front of the cattle and labelled Return Path Leaving Flight Zone]

So, balance point. Each of these animals has a balance point on the shoulder. So, if I’m walking, it actually doesn’t make sense, but if I’m walking away from this animal, she’s going to tend to move forward. And when I – when I get out of her flight zone, I walk away and I walk back again, I can get these animals to move forward even though I’m moving kind of backwards to that flow. So, we got to think about, where do we want them to go, and which way do I move. If you try and go back here and move this way [indicating with the mouse pointer the same direction of the cattle] okay, this cow may recognize what’s going on [indicating the last cow in line], but these [indicating the first cow in the line] – this is the one we got to move. Okay? Because if she doesn’t move, this one don’t move [indicating the second cow in line]. So, now we’ve gotten a little pipeline. And once they’re in the pipeline or their chute, you know, now we’ve got a little more control of where their gonna – where they can only go, right? They can’t go left; they can’t go right. They gotta go forward. Now, one cow can want, that animal can decide, I’m not going to go forward either or I’m going to back up. And so, we put in, you know, features into a facility so that they can’t back up, for example. Or we have to be able to encourage them to move forward.

[slide titled – Design Principles (1 of 3) – and the following list – Facility design and management are both required; Stockmanship (management) – The knowledgeable and skillful handling of livestock in a safe, efficient, effective, and low-stress manner, integration of art and science in the handling of cattle; Understand cattle behavior; One person should be able to – isolate and restrain animal, safety – animal and person, conveniently]

So, facility design and management are both required. Stockman is the management side of things. The knowledge and the definition that I found off the Stockmanship Journal’s page: the knowledge and skillful handling of a live – of livestock in a safe, efficient, effective, and low-stress manner. It’s also the integration of an art and science of cattle handling. We know some of the science now. We know it much better than we used to. We know better ani – better what animal, how animals will behave or should behave, if given these circumstances. The art maybe still is, you know, we have to do this in an artificial environment, I guess we could say, of a facility or farmstead. So, understanding cattle behavior is certainly important.

My goal, I guess, when I’m looking at design is, unless you have lots of kids around that can help you –

[David Kammel, on-camera]

– gather those animals, it’s usually a one – one-person or two-person job. So, we should be able to do this by ourselves. With the right facility, we should be able to do it with one person. So, we should be able to isolate and restrain an animal. We should be able to do it safely for both people and the animal. And it should be convenient. Should be able to get it done quickly.

[slide titled – Design Principles (2 of 3) – featuring this list under the heading – Facility features to direct animal – Lanes; Gates and barriers (fences); Solid or Open Fences; Uniform lighting; Free of distracting of unfamiliar objects – anything new will cause animal to balk (stop and investigate)]

So, facility features that help direct an animal. We – we showed you a little bit, lanes or a chute. Gates and barriers or fences, basically, confine the space that they’re in. They can’t go any further than that fence. Well, most of the time.

[laughter]

Right?

It’s not like animals don’t jump fences or go through fences, but that’s back to design. If I didn’t design the fence properly and I know that this is, as we – if – if we look at fences, we have fences on our property –

[David Kammel, on-camera]

– for example, they don’t have to be wooden board, like five-wire electric fences because there’s not a lot of pressure on those fences. As we confine animals to a smaller area, then the fences might have to get more substantial. They’re not just, in the case of electricity, not just psychological barrier. They touch the fence. They learn the fence. They know it – it’s hot. It’s going to sting them if they touch it. They don’t go to the fence.

[return to the – Design Principles (2 of 3) – slide]

They stay away from it.

So, as we confine them, we have to put more substantial fences. So, when you look at cattle handling facilities, when we have lots of cattle in a small space –

[David Kammel, on-camera]

– and they’re tightly packed, now we’re going to have more – more substantial fences that can resist that pressure. And it cant – won’t be broken down or run through.

Uniform lighting; free of distract – distracting or unfamiliar objects.

[return to the – Design Principles (2 of 3) – slide]

Again, something new for cattle is something they have to explore. Anything new will cause them to possibly balk, basically stop and investigate All they want to do is, What is that? Okay, I need to touch it. I need to lick it. I need to understand it’s not a – not something that’s going to harm me.

[new slide titled – Design Principles (3 of 3) – featuring the following list – Designed to withstand – 1500-pound animal load, equipment loads; Flexible design – multiple and varied use; Identify Potential Hazards – to animal, to person, pinch points, jagged edges, sharp corners, clearances]

So, when we get fences that are really with a lot of cattle in a tight space, we need to – we have to build them strong enough, not only for people but sometimes equipment that gets in the way or doesn’t stop at the fence. I try and provide as much flexibility in the design as possible or we try to with – when we’re talking through with a client or a farm.

We have to identify potential hazards. A lot – again, things that Temple Grandin, it seems simple, but Temple Grandin showed. Walk through the facility, on your hands and knees, if – if necessary, to understand where that animal got cut on its hide or where there was a pinch point, and that animal was injured. If you – if you can find – you find those and you eliminate them, and that’s going to not cause as much problem when you’re moving cattle through that facility.

So, any of those things that can cause – cause damage to the people or – or the animal.

[new slide titled – Basic Sections in a working facility – with the following check marked list – Access and sorting alley from pens to working area; Holding pens/gates; Crowding gate/pen/tub; Working alley/chute/Squeeze chute; Restraining area – Head gate; Loading area/alley/chute; Scales; Additional Facility Features – Sick Pen, Treatment Pen]

We’re going to talk a little bit now about the facility itself. The basic sections in a cattle-working facility. We have access and sorting alleys from the pens to the working area. That might be pasture pens. That might be confined pens.

[David Kammel, on-camera]

We have holding pens or gates where we are kind of staging the animals to be in this pen for a short time before we move them to the next stage of the handling facility. We have a crowding gate, a pen, or a tub. There’s a bunch – several different ways that we can start getting the animals more and more isolated without them knowing it or without – with natural flow and them not quite getting it. And by the time we get them in the right position, it’s too late.

Working alley and chute is that single line that I showed you of one animal kind of head to tail behind each other. They can’t go anywhere. The facility hopefully is strong enough to hold them within that. It’s high enough that they can’t go over it. So, they’re not going to go anywhere except forward and backward.

We have the restraint area. Some call it a head gate. Some call it a squeeze. Lots of different terms there in the industry. We have a loading area, alley, or chute where we have to load and unload animals. We may or may not have scales in the facility. And a lot of times in facilities we have a space where we can put an animal that’s not feeling well, or we want to treat and let – take away from the herd, treat it, make sure it’s getting feed and water, it’s not having to compete with the rest of the animals at – and – with – with no – with no feed and water, just getting sicker. So, I usually – there’s usually some kind of facility, in a handling facility, that I’ve worked on with most farms where we have to have a space for one or two animals that aren’t doing well, and we want to let them recover. I sometimes call them vacation pens or sick pens. A vacation pen is – its a pen they may need to go and stay there a week, and if we just take care of them, make sure they get food and water, they may be able to recover. Maybe it’s a lame animal that just needs to be able to let that foot heal.

A sick pen might be a little more intense, okay? It’s an emergency. Now we gotta – we have to do surgery, or we have to put – get a bolus down their throat, or we have to intubate them to take care of them.

So, those are the sections. This is what would be commonly called –

[slide titled – Basic sections in a cattle handling facility – featuring an illustration of a crowding tub design of a semicircular cattle handling facility with a head gate on the far end of the semicircle that leads to a working chute that funnels the cattle to the other side of the semicircle which is a large open space labelled as a crowding tub that ends in a gate. On the other side of the gate is the area marked as a holding pen]

– called a crowding tub design. This is the tub here. [circling the area in the illustration marked crowding tub with the mouse pointer] It’s got a swing gate on this post that can swing in a circle. And we can have crowding tubes that are quarter circles, half circles, even three-quarter circles. We have curved chutes. [uses the mouse pointer to circle the area on the illustration marked working chute] We’re trying to, again, use that animal behavior to say, you know, when the animals start turning, they said, Oh, that’s kind of where I wanted to go anyway, so I’ll just keep going that way. Im not – I don’t have to go straight because I don’t like going straight because I don’t see where I’m going straight. In this case, once they get in this chute, they can still see some animals in front of them, so they don’t feel isolated necessarily. They’re just part of the herd. Maybe there’s nobody on either side of me at some point, but I’m still okay.

Once we get them to this point through the working chute to the restraint [uses the mouse pointer to circle the area at the end of the chute labelled head gate], now they see daylight, right? They see, Oh, that’s a big opening. That’s a good place to go. Cause that’s not in this kind of solid-sided, dark space. When they move into that space, they’re going to probably move fairly quickly. And that’s why we have automatic latching or systems or just good training to make sure we get her restrained properly without going through the chute. Once they’re in the chute, they can be restrained, and that’s where we can do some of the treatments –

[new slide titled – Holding Pens – featuring a photograph of a holding pen]

– that we talked about before.

So, holding pens. Just some pictures. Most of this is all in Wisconsin on farms that I’ve worked with. Just really good, hefty, stout gates and fences to hold animals that are probably going to be in here packed pretty tight, okay? So, they don’t have a lot of opportunity to get – get up speed because there’s no area to speed up in, but they’re also being under a little stress because they don’t necessarily want to be tight – that tightly packed. They’re hoping to go somewhere else, okay? And, you know, that’s part of the design is, if they’re confined and they want to leave, we make sure they leave where we want them to leave, right?

[new slide titled – Crowding Tub Entrance – featuring a photo of the entrance to a crowding tub on a farm that David helped design]

Crowding tub. So, this is an entry into that crowding tub. You see a lot of guardrail fence. This is probably the most popular and recycled item on most farms that are – have any kind of cattle handling facility. You pick it up at the county township or highway department. Pretty inexpensive and makes a really good stout fence. And it doesn’t cost much. This piece they bought. You know, this is a purchased crowding tub here. But all the rest of this farmstead most of the fences and gates were all hand-built –

[new slide titled – Working chute – featuring a photo of the working chute on the same farm taken from a high angle]

– or home-built.

Once we get them into the tub, here’s the curved chute. It depends, again, if you want a solid sided one or an open sided one. If I want cattle to see me so they move, it’s going to be open. If they’re in a system where they, in other facilities where we want to move lots of cattle and we’re going to have much longer chutes, and we don’t have people out there moving those animals, they just move as a – as a group, individually, then we’re probably going to have solid sides.

[new slide titled – Scale – featuring a photo of a livestock scale on the same property]

The scales may be integrated into the restraint system or separate.

[new slide titled – Squeeze Chute – featuring a photograph of a squeeze chute on a farm property]

This is a squeeze chute they would call it. So, we can actually get an animal in there of very different sizes and basically comfort them. It’s kind of like swaddling we’ll call it. And I dont, again, don’t mean to necessarily relate people to cattle, but when they get confined, they tend to calm down, okay? They have – they feel more comfortable. So, we squeeze them, actually, to help them calm down.

[new slide titled – Palpation Door Open – featuring a photo of an open palpation door on a farm]

This is a palpation door. So, once we’ve got an animal in that squeeze, we got her head here and her butt here, and that’s the two ends we usually work on with cattle. Sometimes from the side, and we’ll get to that in a second. But palpation, real basically, allows a person to get behind the animal. It’s already restrained by – in the neck and the shoulders so it can’t back up. So, you’re in a safe space, you can do the treatments that you need to back there. From the front side, you can reach the animal’s head and neck.

[new slide titled – Palpation Door Closed – featuring a photo of the same palpation door as the previous slide but now with the door closed]

So, open or closed. Once an animal I – this little gate here just keeps – keeps the animal behind it away from that space, right? So, that nose of that last animal that’s not in the chute is right at that gate. It goes vertical because it’s more convenient to go up and down than it would be swinging. Swinging would be really bad because if she kept – decided to keep going, she’s just going to hit the gate and swing with – and you may swing with the gate.

[new slide titled – Injection Site Access closed – featuring a photo of a gated area on a farm with the access doors closed]

Newer systems over the years, again, with beef quality assurance. And most farms – does anybody know where the most convenient place to inject an animal with something is on an –

[David Kammel, on-camera]

-on an animal? A beef cow or a dairy cow? Where’s the most convenient place to stick ’em, they call it?

[Male Audience Member, off-camera]

Tail head?

[David Kammel, on-camera]

Tail head, or rump. Where’s some of the better meat on an animal? At the rump, that round. So, what happened is they would give injections, you would get a lesion from that injection, and you’d get docked at the slaughter plant because you had some meat that was not valuable anymore. So, the industry has changed to getting neck, inject them in the neck, because theres not so many – the prime rib is not at the neck, right? [laughs] So, you try and inject the animal up at the neck where there isn’t as valuable a meat cut. And so, they had to design a system where they built – or I’m going to go back and forth here – a little gate, so the old system didn’t have this little door. And a lot of people got injured because they’d either try to stick them from the front side in the neck and the animal would pull back and they’d get their hand pulled into the gate a little bit or pinched –

[return to the slide labelled – Injection Site Access Closed – featuring the photo of the injection pen]

– or they’d try and do it from the back side through one – maybe one of these – one of these slots. And, again, the animal might move forward, and you get your hand pinched. So, people were getting injured and, basically, breaking needles or causing other damage. So, the industry figured out, you know, Maybe we should do this. We just put a little door there that we can open up. We can get to the neck very easily, and we can do it quickly and generally we’re not going to get hurt and the animal’s not going to get hurt.

[new slide titled – Sorting Pens – featuring a photograph of a large sorting pen on a farm]

Sorting pens. Probably one of the, again, one of the keys that I guess most farm – beef farmers or dairy farmers that have now become beef farmers don’t understand or don’t realize until they’re into the system is, I’m going to have to sort cattle here, and how do I do that? Sorting cattle in the dairy herd was walking amongst the dairy cows and deciding, touching this cow and she went where she wanted to with the farmer because she – she knew that’s what I need to do. Beef cattle, not so much. So, here we got a be able to swing gates. We got to be able to release that animal and let her go into whatever number of pens that we have in sorting.

[new slide titled – Shelter – featuring a photo of a farmer standing in front of a roofed shelter space with his herd to the right of the shelter]

Shelter, that’s mainly for people, cause some of this jobs done – could have been done last night during a rainstorm, okay? And trying to do that work in a rainstorm would not have been very fun. And probably people would get upset and cattle would get upset. So just sun, weather, just having a place to do it that’s convenient.

This is a farm up in Vernon County that actually ships cattle in from Missouri in the spring that had been on range, so they’re pretty wild cattle. Brings in probably over 1,000-2,000 animals over the course of a month. They go out in pasture in – in Wisconsin and have a great summer and then get loaded up in the fall and move to maybe a feed lot. So, they – they are not what we would consider our normal –

[David Kammel, on-camera]

– dairy steer. They’re pretty range – rangy cattle, they would call it, pretty spooky. You gotta have different facilities, and you gotta be able to handle them in a large – in large groups.

So, cattle flow basically –

[slide titled – Cattle Flow – featuring an illustration of the flow of how a cattle operation works starting at the top with two horizontal rectangles at the top marked Sorting Pen 1 and Sorting Pen 2 that both have arrows pointing to a larger vertical rectangle labelled Access Alley which lead to two horizontal rectangles at the bottom marked Holding Pen 1 and Holding Pen 2. These are funneled into a circle labelled Crowding Tub and from there go to another vertical rectangle labelled Working Chute – this working chute may or may not have a Scale. From the Working Chute they travel either to a Loading Chute or the Squeeze Headgate where they again arrive back at the two Sorting Pens]

– is moving from that access alley we talked about. That might be a pen or an alley that goes out to pastures. We might have several holding pens that can break the group into smaller groups but still stay as a group. We break it down into a smaller group yet through a crowding tub where we might only have a tub that can hold three or four animals as a group. We – we can isolate them and get them into a working chute. Maybe we divert them through a scale, or the scale is part of the working chute. At this point, maybe we can divert them to a loading chute or a loading area or to the headgate or squeeze where we can work – work with the animal. And then we can sort them, in this case, and, possibly, we can bring that sorting pen number one all the way back through the system. So, just one big flow, one circular flow. We don’t have to move cattle backwards. Again, most of the stockman people would say cattle don’t have a rear, you know, a backup gear or a reverse gear. They want to move forward. They’re very, very difficult.

[David Kammel, on-camera]

You can get animals to move backwards, but it’s under – going to be under a little stress to do so. Only if they know that’s the only escape route.

So, here’s the flow in that crowding tub.

[slide titled – Crowding Tub Cattle Flow – featuring an illustration that is viewing the operation from above with the cattle entering through the Main Gate and then into a smaller area through a Crowding Gate and then into a chute that may have a Loading Chute coming off the start of the chute or Catwalk that circles around to a Scale and then a Vet Gate and then into a Squeeze]

We bring a few animals.

[a yellow arrow pointing towards the chute appears in the area marked Crowding Gate]

We’re not trying to fill that tub up with as many animals as we can. We just gotta have enough animals that can fit into this curved chute. So, we kind of feed this chute here. This will size this pen, this crowding tub. And then we’ll just bring in smaller subgroups to move them through, and just keep a continuous flow on this end with people. As people are working on the animals on this end, now we’ve got multiple people doing multiple tasks and trying to keep the flow even and ongoing. We don’t want to have to stop, okay? Something happens here [indicating the Vet Gate and Squeeze areas of the illustration with the mouse pointer], everything shuts down. Something happens here [indicating the area of the Main Gate with the mouse pointer], we can’t work. So, you know, when we’re working a lot of cattle, that’s part of the – part of the

[four yellow arrows animate in the chute to indicate the flow of the cattle]

– design –

[the four yellow arrows animate off and are replaced by a single yellow arrow pointing to the bottom of the illustration where the squeeze is]

– is making sure that that all flows nice. And, at that point, we can sort.

[slide featuring toy cows and fences arranged as a cattle operation]

So, here’s my little cartoon. I did this at home one day. I got these cattle panels, actually, from a gentleman in – at Ohio State in Extension, and I built a couple of versions for my county agents to help work with farmers. And, okay, again, visual learning a little bit. Tell me – show me what you got now, and then let’s figure out what we could do with that. Maybe we have to totally eliminate it or remove it all, but most farms don’t like that idea. I generally don’t, I get pretty, I get look – look backs at, Well, we’re not going to totally abandon what we got. We’d like to use what we got as best we can and not have to recreate it all over again. So, this is my little Claymation.

My cat –

[the slide animates the main gate closing behind the toy herd]

– okay, my little gate. I – I put my gate at the corner if you noticed –

[the slide animates forward two slides as the cattle head into the crowding tub and then returns again to the first slide of the animation with the main gate open]

Sorry.

I put that gate along a fence in a corner. So, the natural tendency for that group is to move along that fence, and I want to have an opening at that fence. I don’t want to swing that gate the opposite way and expect them to think – know that they need to go in that space. So, I use, you know, so just gate swings and gate locations is probably one of the key – keys that most farms don’t really identify until it’s on paper. Oh, that gate really, or they’ve used a facility and realized that gate’s on the wrong post. Okay? It’s hinged on the wrong side.

[return to the second slide with the main gate having been closed on the toy cattle]

So, we get the cows into the holding pen.

[the slide animates the toy cows moving from the main gate into the crowding tub]

We open another gate. We get a few cows into the crowding tub.

[slide animates two of the cows moving from the crowding tub to the chute]

That crowding tub swings a gate kind of in a circular fashion. The crowding tub gate also has kind of a locking – a locking mechanism. So, if you move it forward, it can’t move backwards. So, we kind of continuously reduce the size of the space over time. It’s not supposed to push them. It’s just supposed to reduce the pen size so they realize, This is a smaller pen, I probably should go over there because I don’t feel pressure if I go over there cause that gate’s not behind me anymore.

[slide animates one cow going into the toy squeeze]

Once we get into the squeeze –

[slide animates the cow that was in the squeeze moving back to the holding pen]

– I can swing a gate, I can let that animal out that way –

[slide animates the second cow going into the squeeze and then animates the gate swinging the other way and animates the second cow going into a separate pen from the holding pen]

– and maybe this animal I swing a gate and I let out that way. Okay? So, my little cartoons.

[new slide titled – Bud Box working principles – featuring the following bulleted list – Place exit as close to the entry gate as possible; cattle must go past the exit opening; Concerns – Stockmanship is a priority, Working cattle from inside the pen, Preferable to work from outside the pen with flag or on a catwalk]

That was a crowding tub. This is a Bud Box principles. Bud Box was named after a stockman named Bud Williams out West that could basically move about any critter in the world. He’s – hes shown on YouTube, if you ever want to look, shown moving antelope and wild animals and wildebeests and moving them with just his body, you know. Out in the open savanna, and he’s able to move a group of animals and get them to go where nobody would think they could ever want to go.

But he developed the Bud Box principle which really was more related to using Stockmanship rather than a facility to move animals. Use the philosophy of animal behavior and how animals behave to move the animals rather than gates and pens.

What he showed is if you have an animal go past that opening to a dead end, what – the animal is going to want to turn around and come back where it was. By that time, the gate’s closed. It can’t go out where it came, but it does see an opening nearby, okay? And you can do this with –

[new slide titled – Bud Box Design – featuring the following bulleted list – 14X20 to load a chute; 14X30 to load a truck; number of animals worked through bud box should match the capacity of the working alley; Bud box capacity should be no more than half full; Exit opening wide enough for one animal (or double alley); person working properly is important]

– or without people in the pen.

[new slide titled – Bud Box Plan – featuring an architectural drawing of how a Bud Box works – starting with an entrance lane at the bottom right that along with the Bud Box measures 20 feet long and has a solid panel and gate leading into the Bud Box. The rest of the Bud Box measures 16 feet on the far solid side dead end and 10 8 on the gate adjacent to the chute and then an additional 3 for personnel gate north of the chute. Out of the Bud Box to the west is an 18 double alley that allows one head of cattle per alley. These flow into an 8 single alley and then to an 8 scale and then another 8 feet to the end of the chute]

So, this is the idea. We’re going to move animals in a lane to the dead end. This is a solid side. [indicating the dead end with the mouse pointer] So, here’s where we use solid sides and open sides. These are open sides. [indicating the 20 stretch leading to the dead end] This is open side. [indicating the 10 8 area] This is open side. [indicating the entrance lane side] This is a solid gate here. Cattle are moving in this direction. This might have been a gate or it’s just a dead end in the pen on a solid side. Cattle move in that direction. They tend to want to move back. By that time, the cattle handler has shut this gate. Now that becomes a solid side or a dead end. Cattle turn around, they don’t see this opening [indicating the solid panel gate that has been shut behind them], but they do see this opening [indicating the opening to the double alley]. So, their natural tendency is, We’ll just go there. It’s simpler to go there because I want to get out of this dead end.

The double alley is actually another kind of a North Dakota design where they still wanted the animals to feel like they were within the group. So, side – the animals can be side by side. They can see another animal side by side, but you also have to give them some ability to overtake the other animal to get into the single chute. So, at this point, instead of trying – having no gate here, this little gate basically allows this animal, if it’s got – if its stronger, to push the gate shut to block this animal and get into the chute. If this animal is stronger, it’ll push the gate this way and get into the chute.

[new slide titled – Bud Box Cattle Flow – featuring a basic illustration of a Bud Box shaped like a rectangle with a 14 on the left side, a 20 loading chute or 30 loading truck area at the bottom leading to a solid gate that is labelled Entry. At the top is a narrow chute labelled Exit]

So, here’s just a little flow diagram.

[four yellow arrows facing left animate in to indicate cattle moving in from the right and a little green happy face indicates a stockman]

Cattle move into the dead end of the pen.

[the slide animates the gate closing behind the yellow arrowed cattle flow]

The people, the stockman can be in the pen.

[the slide animates the arrows hitting the dead end and turning around and then entering the chute]

And he’s going to, instead of going around, excuse me, going around this side to work [indicating the bottom or near side of the pen] the animals, he actually goes in the opposite side that most people would think you need to be. They think you need to be here to force them through that opening. He’s just – hes trying to get them to go past that – past him and find that opening on themselves.

[slide animates on the little green happy faced Stockman at the top or far end of the Bud Box and shows arrows to the left and right of the green happy-faced Stockman indicating him moving at any place along the top or far end of the Bud Box]

So, once he gets in here, he can move back and forth –

[the slide reanimates in the yellow arrows indicative of the movement of the cattle with them ultimately ending up in the chute]

– and either put pressure on the animal or not put pressure on the animal to get them moving in this direction.

[the slide animates on another green happy-faced Stockman with the same arrows OUTSIDE the Bud Box itself on the north side of the drawing at the open gated area]

And the other option is, if this is – if this is open side, he might be able to do that from outside the pen. Now there’s no chance for the person to get hurt by an animal, if they’re not in the pen.

[new slide featuring Davids toy cows set up in a Bud Box type configuration with the cattle entering through the gate towards the Bud Box]

So, here’s my little cartoon cow, my little dairy cows.

[the slide animates the cows entering the Bud Box and the gate closing behind them]

They’re tagged, if you can see. They got tags on the bottom. [laughs] Come to the dead end. They turn around. See that opening.

[slide animates the cows turning around to see the gate through which they entered closed and then head towards the chute opening and the squeeze]

That other gate was closed. Now they work through the chute. Okay?

[new slide titled – Simple Working Chute – featuring an architectural drawing of a basic chute for the Monroe County Cattle Handling Company. Besides the chute the drawing has a red section that indicates differing gate positions for the chute]

So, here’s some simple systems that have been put up by farms – farms that I’ve learned from. I learn – every time I’m on a farm I learn something, I guess. I’ve always found that I do learn something from some – from the farmers I work with. This is in Monroe; it was on a county farm.

[new slide featuring a photo of the end result from the architectural drawing in Monroe]

Just a little simple squeeze chute with one gate. And this is actually part of the pen that the cattle are sheltered in when they’re not being worked. Farmers – farm couldn’t afford to have whole working facility they’d only used once in a while. So, they had to integrate it into the housing system.

[new slide featuring a photo of the same chute and squeeze in Monroe at a closer angle]

The gate can basically open, they can move an animal, use the gate kind of as a funnel gate. Generally, these are heifers or dairy animals, so they’re not that hard to move around. They just need to be restrained a little bit – keep from moving into an open area. And then they can move them through the space.

[new slide titled – Small Cattle Handling Facility – featuring an architectural drawing of a small facility. At the top is a 32 gate with a small personal pass, to the right is a 24 2 wall that has a 12 gate at the end, on the left is another 242 wall that is on the same side as the chute and at the bottom is an 11 8 wall that makes up the top side of the chute and has a 12 gate attached that is the entrance to the chute. At the end of the chute is an 8 gate that leads to a loading/unloading area]

This is a small handling facility out in a – usually on a pasture where we got animals on pasture, but we be able – need to be able to get them into the pasture –

[David Kammel, on-camera]

– unload them into a pen, maybe check them. Maybe they’ve been purchased somewhere else, and we gotta – we want them acclimated to the area before we send them out into the pasture. We may have to train – train them to a fence, an electric fence, or what the fences are. This is also the place where they may get a treat. So, in the end, we build a little square box with a couple of gates that we can get animals into, and they are comfortable in that space. So, this – this should be like the – when you come home. Okay? This is – this your home. This is where you’re safe.

In fact, what a lot of farms will do is they’ll grain animals that are in pasture in this space so that the cattle will walk in their naturally because, Yeah, I want a treat. I dont – I can go into that pen and get a treat whenever that bucket is shaking, or the five-gallon bucket is clanging together. They come into the pen on their own accord. I don’t even have to go chase – chase them into the pen. They come on their own. I give them a little call maybe. “Come Boss!” or whatever you want to say, back in the day. I can remember that as a boy.

[slide titled – Small Cattle Handling Facility – featuring a photo of a small cattle facility on a farm]

So, here’s the gates. A couple of swing gates.

[new slide still under the heading – Small Cattle Handling Facility – featuring a photo of a different farms small facility]

Something home built. Basically, one – one or two pieces of purchased equipment from Farm and Fleet or Fleet Farm, wherever. Pipe gates, some home-built fence, and – and a little headgate.

[new slide featuring Davids toy cows now configured as a small cattle handling facility with the main gate open and the cows heading into the facility]

So, same idea. So, maybe they came in because I grained them, and they just wanted – wanted to come into the pen to get their grain and I gave it to them.

[slide animates the cows going into the facility and the gate closing behind them]

And all the sudden I shut the gate. Okay, that wasn’t a big deal. I didn’t have to chase them. They did it on their own. That was their behavior doing it. I got them into the pen, now I want to work with one animal.

[slide animates the cows milling about the pen and then a gate swinging to herd one cow through the gate and into the chute]

I swing a gate, get her through the chute, and deal with all the rest of them as I need to. Or I sort them off into another pen –

[new slide titled – Remodeled Cattle Handling – featuring an architectural drawing of a large cattle handling facility with several holding pens, a vet area, and a maternity pen]

– if I need to.

So, I’ll kind of finish off with another set of facilities. So again, I mentioned most of the farms I work with are already existing –

[David Kammel, on-camera]

– dairy farms or beef farms, already have existing facilities, or they were dairy farm with a tie stall barn that no longer is used to milk cows and they’re a beef farmer. So, what do we do with that old tie stall barn? This is actually in an old tie stall barn. In old tie stall barns, there usually was a set of columns, two sets of columns in that barn with a big, what we’d call a kind beam that supported –

[return to the previous slide with the drawing of the large remodeled facility]

– a hay mound floor because they stored hay above. In the day probably when they were built, there was loose hay. And at some point, it became small squares baled hay. And now it’s probably large square packages with a skid steer running up on top of that surface. But, anyway, the posts are there. We’re not going to move them because a lot of times that was part of the structure that held the roof up, so we can’t take the columns away or – or the barn will fall down. But, in this case, you know, weve – I’ve come up with several designs where we try and reuse this, repurpose this old facility.

[new slide featuring a photo of the remodeled barn facility taken from the outside]

It doesn’t look like a cattle handling facility. In fact, they had large square bales they could run up a ramp with a skid steer and put hay up on there mechanically.

[new slide featuring a photo of the inside of the remodeled barn and its cattle handling operations]

Probably the pictures are a little dark, but this is one of the – of the – between the columns, basically. It becomes a long alley or a holding pen.

[new slide featuring a photo of the crowding tub area of the remodel barn]

It feeds into a crowd tub that we could fit, you know, within this space of the columns and the width of the barn we had to work with, into a working chute –

[new slide featuring a photo of the chute in the remodeled barn]

– walk through the chute to a –

[new slide featuring a photo of the squeeze area of the remodeled barn]

– little squeeze area, and then that squeeze area basically is pointing out to the other – other door on the other end of the barn so that we could – when we released an animal, it didn’t run into a wall. It ran out to the open, or – or ran into an area where we had several gates where we could start off. You notice just another slider gate here. Instead of sliding up and down, I don’t have any up and down in this barn because the ceiling is only eight-foot high. So, we had to do a slider to the side to kind of separate animals one from another.

[new slide featuring a photo of the old gutter area of the barn now cleared out]

You even notice the gutter. In this case, the – if you’re not familiar with old dairy barns, usually the cows either faced in or faced out, right? We had a feed manger either on the outside walls or in the inside – inside of the barn. In this case, this farm – farm had the cows facing in. This is the old gutter where the gutter cleaner was. We tore everything out of this area. Filled in the gutter. Again, you can’t tear out all the concrete and just start new. They just couldn’t afford it. So, filled in the gutter. We actually designed the system; we went over the plan several times. We actually just used pipe gates, temporarily, lined up where we thought they should be to run the cattle through the system and figured out, Yep, that gate don’t belong there or that gate’s not in the right swing. And eventually they just put in boards and found out it worked like it should, we’ll just put in boards, so we don’t have to use all those purchased gates.

[new slide titled – Remolded Bud Box – featuring an architectural drawing of a barn that has been converted to a Bud Box type of handling facility]

So, here’s a remodeled Bud Box I’ve actually done for a small farm up in Polk County, a young guy that’s work – working cattle. This is actually outside. This was his cattle lane from pastures. So, cattle came from the barnyard down here in an old barn area to the pastures through this lane. So, this was a natural traffic pattern for the cattle. Okay? They knew that lane. They knew where – what it – that there was nothing – nothing problematic in going up and down that lane.

[new slide featuring a photo of the remodeled facility and the outside lane]

So, here’s that lane, as I show you on – from this slide, from the front. Here’s the squeeze; here’s the chute; here’s the cattle lane.

[new slide featuring a photo of the squeeze area of the remodeled farm facility]

He wanted to put it on concrete so – because it got to be pretty muddy in this area cause he worked cattle in the spring and spring is when we’re probably calving and need to be able to handle – handle animals, but it’s also possibly rainy, muddy season. So, we had to improve the area a little bit. Eventually he was going to put a roof over it, but, at this point, can’t afford it.

[new slide featuring photo of the dead end area of the remodeled Bud Box facility]

So, this is the end of that lane. That’s the end of my Bud Box. Cattle can walk past the opening on the right, hit that dead end, turn around –

[new slide featuring a photo of the farmer closing the gate that is behind the dead end area of the Bud Box on his farm]

– block a gate on the other – on this end, or they can go straight through, and they don’t know any different.

[new slide featuring the chute area of the remodeled Bud Box farm facility]

Once they get into the chute, he actually wanted a double chute design. He liked that idea. Again, he built this kind of by himself.

[new slide featuring a photo of the double chute area of the remodeled Bud Box farm facility]

Double chute out of that Bud Box. Here’s his little flipper gate he just designed out of some springs. And, you know, everything’s home built. You know, solid old telephone poles and solid sawn lumber and a little ingenuity. So, this is the gate that he designed for his little flipper gate.

[new slide titled – Cattle Handling System is a tool – featuring the following list – to implement your management plan and protocol; to protect you; to protect your animals; to save you time]

With that, I just wanted to conclude, you know, we talked about design and management, that system or handling system –

[David Kammel, on-camera]

– can be humane if we think about what we’re trying to do with the animal and understand its behavior and not force it to do things at – which physically, yeah, sometimes we can do, but it usually just takes too much out of either the people or the animal to do it that way. If we can just use some of their behavior to make them do what we want. We’re trying to implement a plan that we come up with or that farm comes up with. We’re trying to protect the animal, we’re trying to protect the people, and save some time. And, with that – so

[applause]