Horses aren’t the only livestock that need to be trained, says a Montana rancher.
Curt Pate, who teaches courses on low stress cattle handling and low stress colt starting, makes little distinction between training cattle and horses.
“We’re getting our cattle ready the same way we’re getting a colt ready for the saddle,” he told a stockmanship seminar organized by the Farm Animal Council of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon March 26-27.
“We’re teaching them to take pressure. It’s the same concept, only in a little different light.… I look at the squeeze chute as the saddle. That’s no different than putting a saddle and strapping it on a colt for the first time.”
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However, Pate said training cattle isn’t taken as seriously as training horses and dogs.
“We’re still in the philosophy of building a bigger facility, bigger hydraulic gate, a longer wing. We’re all in the facilities still to get our cattle to work for us.”
Pate, who is also an American Quarter Horse Association clinician, said the dairy industry is a good example of how cattle can be successfully trained.
The biggest hurdle is human behaviour, he added.
“We as humans have to learn from the first day of school to get in line. That’s a skill that is very hard to break,” he said.
“Cattle don’t like that. That’s not their world.”
One of the first rules for training and handling cattle is to make sure the animals can see their handler and know their intent.
“As long as they can see you and not have to turn their head, you’re OK. When the animal turns his head, that’s no good.”
He recommended working just the nose instead of getting in behind to work the entire animal.
He also warned producers not to become discouraged by failure because nothing works 100 percent all the time.
“The point is to get these animals thinking their way through the situation,” he said.
“Sometimes it’s easier to get the whole herd thinking because of the herd mentality: following and leading, pushing and drawing. With a single animal, it takes a little more time to get it thinking its way through your pressure, just like people.”
He said a suspicious, fearful animal will hide its true feelings, which means it won’t work freely and won’t show that it’s sick until it can’t pick up its head or lift its ears or nose.
“The main thing is finding out what is a content animal,” he said.
“That’s a hard read sometimes. An animal that is gaining weight and healthy, that’s a content animal. An animal swishing his tail, or shaking his head, or picking his head up – those are signs we need to see that tell us our animals are not content.”
Pate also said he credits animal rights groups’ negative campaigning for improving cattle producers’ finances.
“I think some of those groups have got us turned around where they’re actually making us more profitable in our operation because we’ve had to change. We were running a little loose rein and it was costing us a lot of money.”
