Hello Eunice & Bud,

Thank you for the subscription password, I got on and had a look and have  written a bit which may be a bit strong for you to add to your site, I will let you be the judge of that !!

I don’t aim to stirr things up, however like you Bud I believe that someone needs to put the other side or the so called ‘experts’ take us down the wrong road.

Cheers

Jim

 I guess I am the friend that Bud talks about and I would like to add a bit more to Bud’s comments.

I find that some people like things to be complicated when working stock, especially when it comes to yards or corals as you call them in the US.

People will travel thousands of miles to listen about a yard design that ‘might’ get the animals to work well. The scientist that spoke at the field day took great length to point out all the things that ‘must’ be removed before animals will move through the coral properly, like gate chains, vehicles, shadows, roofs, the angle of the sun, and even suggested that men with beards may find it more difficult working cows. Beats me how someone would have the time to dream all that up.

I have spent twenty years showing people how to work animals in a simple way that works and gets results through any coral, ( I have had Bud’s help with this) and I find it difficult to understand how others can find so many ways of making it complicated.

The speaker at the field day strongly suggested that people should not get in the coral with the animals. I would suggest that it is very difficult to work animals properly unless we pressure them correctly from an area that they can see us. People have been getting in corals with animals for thousands of years and not been in danger, mostly because they knew how to work them properly. While ever we focus on trying to remove all the things we ‘think’ the animals may not like, instead of working them the way they like to be worked, we will continue to get increasingly worse results.

I have visited, and conducted schools in corals designed by so called experts and I am yet to see people getting a better overall outcome from the use of them, mostly because they encourage incorrect handling of animals.

We need to understand that learning to work animals properly would give more $ return than anything else available to the livestock industry today. ( I guess I would need to exclude marketing from that Bud !!)

Workplace safety and animal welfare in Australia are industries on their own, and I couldn’t agree more with Bud in that unless we make proactive steps to address them , we will have protocols forced upon us that may be very difficult to work with. In fact that is already the case in some instances.