We keep getting questions from people about the Bud Box.  The Bud Box is just a crowd pen that uses certain principles to help the people work animals easier, while allowing the animals to keep doing what they prefer.  It isn’t just a rectangular pen that can be put anywhere – at any angle – and still be a Bud Box.  How it is built and how it is used are very important.  It could be round or square if it is built properly and used properly.

The first rectangular crowd pen I ever saw was in 1961 at a ranch in California. The cattle came into the pen at one end and went out the other end with no v into a single file alley. When I first saw this I was sure it would be extremely difficult to work animals there. Everybody that was there said how hard it was to pen animals with this crowd pen.  Since I always wanted to pen the animals that meant it would be my job to figure out how to make this work. By this time I’d learned that when something looked difficult a person should start from where the animals had to go.  That meant putting the animals in the pen, then walking up to the entrance to the single file chute and pressuring the animals against the other end. When the animals couldn’t go that way they turned and went by me into the single alley. That was the beginning of the first Bud Box.  All it took was a few changes and the Bud Box came alive.

Now we have all kinds of people trying to build in changes to make it “better.”  What makes it better is just using the right principles, if the principles are changed then it isn’t a Bud Box any more no matter how it is built.