9UNP1477HD_David_Kamel_WordPress

- Welcome everyone to Wednesday Nite @ The Lab, I'm Tom Zinnen. I work here at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for UW Extension and the Cooperative Extension. And on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers, Wisconsin Public Television, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW 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 UW 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 UW Eau Claire and then came down to UW 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 UW 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.

- Thank you. Thank you. 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 UW 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. Bird questions. 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 didn't know necessarily a lot about animal behavior. I had to train myself over the years to understand the animals that I'm trying to design facilities for and help other people, other farmers, understand the animals that sometimes they think they know very well, but sometimes they don't. So I guess the title when I was asked to do it originally was talking about humane facilities. 

So I kind of looked it up, just looked at a couple of different references: 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. 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 same thing, and we have to figure out 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. Again, I've learned through other people lots of different animal behaviors 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. Autistic, you know? She 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. Where pigs are biting tails because of aggression and stress. She found out 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? But she's a person with autism that has been able to explain to us without autism how animals may behave or how they perceive the world. Generally, that's by vision. She's a very visual person. She thinks in pictures. And 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 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. 

Most people have those items on the farm. And, in a lot of cases, I've experienced this 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 went over as a USA ID farmer-to-farmer consultant trying to help them with democracy but, basically, with agriculture, how to become a modern agriculture, if you will, 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, 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, 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 cow and family that has a cow is an artificial inseminator, right? They've 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 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 before she finally could get cinched up enough and they could restrain her to the point where this man could do his job with artificial inseminating this cow. So dangerous for the cow, dangerous for the people, the person holding the cow, dangerous with that man with his arm in the cow. If you had anybody who knows vets, 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. 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 to walk to, you know? Something that you can come up and hug. In fact, they'll usually come up and hug you or lick you or, you know, 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 properly and are doing 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. You get injured, you're going to 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 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, 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. 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 important because the farmers are paying for that time. 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 many farms are, you know, very sensitive to that fact. So another question I usually ask farms: how many here have been injured by an animal on the farm? I may not get 100% of an audience that's farmer that's been injured by an animal, but it's 95% probably. Now, what's an injury? Stepped on foot. Broken arm. You know, a bruise. Banged up, you know, against the gate. Just bowled 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 caused a probably 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. So 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 dairy farmers, now they're beef farmers. And they don't have the facilities that they used to have, 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. 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 because people don't understand how to use that system properly. And we can have a lot of times, more often than not, very little design or 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, because 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. 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 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 their needs. 

At some point we have to choose a design. Whatever the best design is, we'll call it, 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 the farmer has to decide what they're going to build. 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 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 management plan? 

It's really just a list. I tell farmers it's not that complicated. 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 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 a breed there's differences between adults 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. Locally sourced animal that's raised out on the pasture out in a grazing, more of a browser. 

Has anybody seen a Scottish Highlander? What do they have that most other animals don't have? Big horns, okay? Horns that go out quite a ways. So 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 when they're 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 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 usually ask farmers, is money no object? And most farmers say, "Well, yeah, money is an object." We can't just buy everything. We have to, you know, we have to be frugal about this. So you get systems that are partially 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 itself and know how it works and what can be improved on it. So it's always a continual improvement. 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 an animal. Dairy cows may have, at times, what they call a displaced abomasum where the stomach twists, and it'll kill them if you can't do the surgery to untwist the stomach. 

If you're a show cattle and if you go to the county fairs, you're going to see kids clipping cattle, just dressing them up. 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 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 harvested the 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, again, management is changing, in dairy cattle anyway, to say, well, we try and do this before the horn forms, which is called disbudding. If we can do some kind of treatment and most of that is what they call a paste. It's a, a paste that basically burns, chemically burns, the bud of the horn before it starts forming. We can medicate 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 because 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. Hoof trimming. Cattle are trimmed, their hooves are trimmed when they 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 problem with that meat. So branding, implants. Reproduction is another major part of beef cattle, dairy cattle production. It's we have to detect heats. We have to be able to inseminate. We have to be able to check their pregnancy. 

We may synchronize, which means, 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 calf in the cow to make sure it's in the right location or that there is a calf there. And then we eventually calf that cow. We have a place where an animal can calf the cow in a clean environment. So the system is just a tool. It's to implement your plan. It's there to protect the people. It's to protect the animals, and hopefully save time. So let's just go through a little bit 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. 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. Curt Pate, a very famous stockman, explained it this way to a group, and I took it, I thought it was very interesting. Something that people can relate to is that if you 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 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 all around them except right directly behind them. So they have a much wider peripheral vision that we do. We can probably 180-200 degrees, maybe. I can see my tips of my hands. Cattle can see all the way back here. 

Why is that? What are cattle to any other animal that's above them in the food chain? They're prey, right? They're food, right? And they've 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 also a herd animal. It's safety in herds, in a group. 

It's 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. 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. 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 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 we just have to think about that. So I mentioned there are visual senses. Here's their blind spot kind of right directly behind them. We'll get into the flight zone in a second, but when we're moving animals, we basically show, make sure the animal can see us, first off, 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 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 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... Excuse me. 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. 

It reinforces the fact that I made her move, but now I released her. 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 a step back, I will stop. And sometimes you need to make them stop, okay? You don't want to always force them, especially if they're going in the wrong direction. A lot of this is getting developed in what they call BQA, 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 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. 

They can hear low pitched sounds much better than humans. So what we may not hear, they may hear. 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 good of perception there. They don't know where the noise came from. It could be behind them. 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 was out there and that's not a good thing because 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 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 ropes. 

They might even have a slap to make a slap. So it will move them, okay? But it'll also stress them. And I guess I relate this mainly to what we see on the westerns and we take to a dairy farm, and you're trying to do the same thing on a dairy farm when the cattle are in confined pen. There's not a lot of options, 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 fence, if they can't move freely. So what we've learned again on dairy farms is calm, quiet, use your body 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 you were milking?

- [Audience Member] The radio.

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

- [Audience Member] Generally country western.

- Country western or polka. I grew up with polka. But any kind of music. If it's not too loud and it's soothing, they actually like music. 

So smell. They're very sensitive to smells. They will smell their feed, and if it smells funny, they're not going to eat it. They can detect odors several miles away or down 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 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. 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 scents. Which beauty do I want to go talk to? Reproduction, we smell heats and senses the females that are in heat for breeding. Taste and touch. They're kind of on the lower end. They can taste these four areas: sweet, salt, bitter, acidity. They're very sensitive. They have more taste buds than we do. Novel and new food is going to be a challenge for farms. 

Farms know if they switch a feed, that may not be a feed that that animal's 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, so the animal just quit and don't quit eating. Touch. You know, they're sensitive. Their whole body is. Their skin, we got a lot of surface area for temperature, touch, and senses of touch. They use their mouth and their tongue to explore. 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 animal. 

So 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. 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, 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 quite 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 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 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. 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 inclination is I want to get away and 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. 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 because she's got people around her. She's used to people. Even strangers being up against her and touching her and petting her. 

Range cattle. That might be 30 feet or 40 feet or 100 feet because they just don't want to be associated with humans. So range cattle are different than confinement cattle, certainly. Beef cattle are different than dairy cattle. Breed differences within the cattle breeds. Calves, heifers, cows all are different. Back out of an animal's flight zone. Basically, when we come into her, some people call it personal space. It's not a person, so we call it a flight zone because it's not a person, it's an animal's space. So you know, sometimes we still have this issue of trying to humanize animals. 

They're not humans. They're animals. So, backing out of their flight zone will calm her down. Walking into her flight zone may agitate her. Again, just learning from people that do this for a living or teach other people to do it for a living, is for you to understand that animal recognizes where you're at, if she turns her head and looks at you, she knows you're okay. She knows you're there. That's as far as I want you to be from me. I'm okay with that. 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. 

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 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, okay, this cow may recognize what's going on, but this is the one we got to move. Because if she doesn't move, this one don't move. So now we've gotten a little pipeline. And once they're in the pipeline or their chute, now we've got a little more control of 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, 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. 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 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 what animal, how animals will behave or should behave, if given these circumstances. 

The art maybe still is, 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 gather those animals, it's usually a 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. You should be able to get it done quickly. So facility features that help direct an animal. 

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. 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, if we look at fences, we have fences on our property, for example, they don't have to be wooden board, 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's hot. It's going to sting them if they touch it. They don't go to the fence. 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 and they're tightly packed, now we're going to have more substantial fences that can resist that pressure. And it won't be broken down or run through. Uniform lighting free of distracting or unfamiliar objects. 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 something that's going to harm me. So when we get fences that are really with a lot of cattle in a tight space, 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 when we're talking through with a client or a farm. We have to identify potential hazards. Again, things that Temple Grandin, it seems simple, but Temple Grandin showed. Walk through the facility, on your hands and knees, 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 can 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 damage to the people or the animal. 

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. 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 tube. There's several different ways that we can start getting the animals more and more isolated without them knowing it or 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 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 with no feed and water, just getting sicker. So there's usually some kind of facility, 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 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 have to do surgery, or we have to 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 a crowding tub design. 

This is the tub here. 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. 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. 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, now they see daylight, right? 

They see, oh, that's a big opening. That's a good place to go. 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 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 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 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? 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 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 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 group, individually, then we're probably going to have solid sides. The scales may be integrated into the restraint system or separate. 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, again, don't mean to necessarily relate people to cattle, but when they get confined, they tend to calm down. They feel more comfortable. So we squeeze them, actually, to help them calm down. 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 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. So open or closed. Once an animal, this little gate here just keeps the animal behind it away from that space. 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 decided to keep going, she's just going to hit the gate and swing and you may swing with the gate. 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 animal? A beef cow or a dairy cow? Where's the most convenient place to stick 'em, they call it?

- [Audience Member] Tail head?

- 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, they 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 the prime rib is not at the neck, right? 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, 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, or they'd try and do it from the back side through maybe 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. Sorting pens. Probably, again, one of the keys that I guess most 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 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. Shelter, that's mainly for people, because some of this job could have been done last night during a rainstorm. 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 Wisconsin and have a great summer and then get loaded up in the fall and move to maybe a feed lot. So they are not what we would consider our normal dairy steer. They're pretty rangy cattle, they would call it, pretty spooky. 

You gotta have different facilities, and you gotta be able to handle them in large groups. So cattle flow basically 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 groups 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 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. At this point, maybe we can divert them to a loading chute or a loading area or to the head gate or squeeze where we can 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 difficult. You can get animals to move backwards, but it's 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. We bring a few animals. 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. Something happens here, everything shuts down. Something happens here, we can't work. So you know, when we're working a lot of cattle, that's part of the design is making sure that that all flows nice. And, at that point, we can sort. So here's my little cartoon. 

I did this at home one day. I got these cattle panels, actually, from a gentleman 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. 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 backs at 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. Okay, my little gate. I put my gate at the corner, if you noticed... 

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 know that they need to go in that space. So I use, so just gate swings and gate locations is probably one of the 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. It's hinged on the wrong side. So we get the cows into the holding pen. We open another gate. We get a few cows into the crowding tub. 

That crowding tub swings a gate kind of in a circular fashion. The crowding tub gate also has kind of 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 because that gate's not behind me anymore. Once we get into the squeeze, I can swing a gate, I can let that animal out that way, and maybe this animal I swing a gate and I let out that way. So my little cartoons. 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 shown on YouTube, if you ever want to look, shown moving antelope and wild animals and wildebeests and moving them with just his body. 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, 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 or without people in the pen. So this is the idea. 

We're going to move animals in a lane to the dead end. This is a solid side. So here's where we use solid sides and open sides. These are open sides. This is open side. This is open 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, but they do see this opening. 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 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 having no gate here, this little gate basically allows this animal, if it's 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. So here's just a little flow diagram. Cattle move into the dead end of the pen. The people, the stockman can be in the pen. And he's going to, instead of going around, excuse me, going around this side to work 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 trying to get them to go past him and find that opening themselves. So once he gets in here, he can move back and forth and either put pressure on the animal or not put pressure on the animal to get them moving in this direction. And the other option 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. 

So here's my little cartoon cow, my little dairy cows. They're tagged, if you can see. They got tags on the bottom. Come to the dead end. They turn around. See that opening. That other gate was closed. Now they work through the chute. So here's some simple systems that have been put up by farms that I've learned from. Every time I'm on a farm I learn something, I guess. 

I've always found that I do learn something from the farmers I work with. This is in Monroe, it was on a county farm. 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. Farms 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. 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 to keep from moving into an open area. And then they can move them through the space. 

This is a small handling facility out usually on a pasture where we got animals on pasture, but we need to be able to get them into the pasture, unload them into a pen, maybe check them. Maybe they've been purchased somewhere else, and we want them acclimated to the area before we send them out into the pasture. We may have to 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 should be like when you come home. This is 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 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 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. So here's the gates. A couple of swing gates. Something home-built. 

Basically, one or two pieces of purchased equipment from Farm and Fleet or Fleet Farm, wherever. Pipe gates, some home-built fence, and a little head gate. So same idea. So maybe they came in because I grained them and they just wanted to come into the pen to get their grain and I gave it to 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. 

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, 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 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 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 skidsteer 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 the barn will fall down. But, in this case, you know, I've come up with several designs where we try and reuse this, repurpose this old facility. It doesn't look like a cattle handling facility. In fact, they had large square bales they could run up a ramp with a skidsteer and put hay up on there mechanically. Probably the pictures are a little dark, but this is one of the, between the columns, basically. It becomes a long alley or a holding pen. It feeds into a crowd tub that we could fit within this space of the columns and the width of the barn we had to work with, into a working chute, walk through the chute to a little squeeze area, and then that squeeze area basically is pointing out to the other door on the other end of the barn so when we released an animal, it didn't run into a wall. It ran out to the open, or it 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. You even notice the gutter. In this case, 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 of the barn. In this case, this 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. So here's a remodeled Bud Box I've actually done for a small farm up in Polk County, a young guy that's 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. 

They knew that lane. They knew that there was nothing problematic in going up and down that lane. So here's that lane, as I show you from this slide, from the front. Here's the squeeze here's the chute, here's the cattle lane. He wanted to put it on concrete because it got to be pretty muddy in this area because he worked cattle in the spring and spring is when we're probably calving and need to be able to handle animals, but it's also possibly rainy and 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, he can't afford it. 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, block a gate on this end, or they can go straight through and they don't know any different. 

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. Double chute out of that Bud Box. Here's his little flipper gate he just designed out of some springs. 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. With that, I just wanted to conclude that, you know, we talked about design and management, that system or handling system 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 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...
[applause]