My family is a big card-playing family. Every holiday starts with a meal and ends with hours of games of cards. It’s competitive, but the games are always full of laughter and good fun.
My family plays all types of games, but we gravitate toward pitch or pinochle often on the holidays. They’re card games I learned how to play before high school and games that my siblings and I have perfected over the years as our aunts and uncles have good-heartedly challenged us.
While enjoying some games of cards this past weekend, I was thinking about how long it took to get good at the strategies of the games. Now, I can look at a hand and know what my chances are of doing well. I know how far I can push it and play it safe, or how to bid risky if I need to catch up.
So, what does this have to do with cattle handling?
Nothing. But also, a lot.
Like cards, moving cattle on the farm takes years to learn. I remember first sorting animals and getting so frustrated knowing that I wasn’t quite in the right spot at the right time. Play it too timid, and the cow gets away. Play it too aggressive, same result.
There’s a strategy to sorting cows, and no matter how many videos you watch or books you read, it takes time and practice to learn. Having sorted cows for years now, I watch new employees struggle and am reminded of how difficult it can be to learn.
Certainly, like cards, there’s some luck involved, too. Sometimes, you get a group of heifers that are cooperative. Sometimes the draw of the sorting list includes that one heifer who has a knack for finding the escape route or picks on the weakest sorting link.
It’s funny though how much I have enjoyed learning the strategies of card games, and how I also enjoy that feeling when I convince a first calf heifer to enter the milking barn without too much of a fight.
Cattle, after all, are creatures of habit, and they too must learn by doing. How we teach them to be sorted impacts how they behave in the pens and corrals as we work them. There’s the difference between sorting cattle and playing cards; the cards never get a mind of their own and take off! Happy sorting!
The author is a dairy farmer in Kansas and a former associate editor at Hoard’s Dairyman. Raised on a 150-cow dairy near Valley Center, Kansas, Maggie graduated from Kansas State University with degrees in agricultural communications and animal sciences.
