The cheap gear that makes handling work

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Research. Nothing here has been worked yet — no pen, no alley, no stock through either. This is what the cheap end of handling gear does, what it cannot fix, and the order to spend in. When cattle have been through a pen here, the page gets updated with the date.

The gear that makes handling easy is cheap. The gear most people buy first makes it worse.

The prod is usually the wrong answer

A prod moves an animal that will not move. It also teaches her that this pen hurts, so the next time is harder and the one after that harder again. The cost is not avoided, only deferred.

The rule worth having: if an animal will not go forward, something ahead of it is wrong. A shadow across the floor. A reflection off standing water. A person standing where she is meant to go. The prod answers the animal when the problem is in the alley.

Keep one on a shelf for a genuine emergency. A prod in your hand gets used.

What to hold instead

A sorting stick. Fibreglass, 48 to 60 in, plastic paddle on the end. Not for hitting. It extends your reach, so you can change what she sees without walking into her space.

A flag. A strip of plastic on a light staff. It works by making your outline bigger, which is why it moves cattle at fifteen to twenty feet where an arm does nothing.

A stick and a flag together cost less than a prod and do more.

Where you stand, which is free

Cattle have a point of balance at the shoulder. Move behind it and she goes forward. Move ahead of it and she backs or turns. The flight zone is the space around her: step into its edge and she moves, step back and she stops.

To move a line up an alley, walk past them in the opposite direction, inside the flight zone, head towards tail. Walking behind them and pushing does the opposite of what you want.

And do not fill the crowd pen. Half full is the working figure. Cattle in a packed pen have nowhere to go, so they do nothing, so somebody reaches for the prod.

Footing, which is the expensive one

Slick footing is the biggest single cause of balking and of injury while handling. An animal that has slipped once in your pen remembers the spot.

Concrete needs texture: grooves in a square or diamond pattern, roughly 8 in on centre, 1 to 1.5 in wide, half an inch deep, stamped while it is wet. Saw-cutting later works and costs real money. Cheaper is expanded metal mat set into the surface, or grit broadcast over the pour.

On dirt the enemy is mud. Geotextile fabric plus four to six inches of crushed stone over the working area and the alley. It costs more than every piece of gear named here combined, it is invisible in photographs, and it only announces itself in February — which is why it misses first-year budgets.

Latches you can work one-handed

Your other hand has a stick in it. A latch that takes two hands means putting the stick down at the moment you need it.

• Chain and hook works one-handed, works from either side, costs almost nothing.
• Sliding bolts seize with rust and grit, and they seize in the wet, which is when you are in a hurry.
• Put a rubber or chain stop on gates that slam. The bang is free to fix and cattle remember it.

There is a whole page here on what saving two dollars on a gate latch costs: the good latch.

Light, and the things that shine

Cattle move toward light and will not walk into a dark box. Light the far end of the alley, never the animal's face — a lamp aimed back at her stops her dead. Diffuse beats a hard spot: a hard-edged shadow across the floor reads to a cow as a hole in the ground.

After dark, a fixed light on a post beats a headlamp, which throws your own moving shadow down the alley ahead of you — exactly the thing you are trying to remove.

Then walk the alley at cow height and take out everything that moves or shines: a coat on a rail, a hanging chain, a flapping feed sack, a puddle. None of it costs anything, and all of it is why an animal stopped.

What we are buying

The cheap half of this is decided already. A stick and a flag get bought and the prod does not, and that is not a close call. The open part is the expensive half: geotextile and four to six inches of stone over a working area that does not exist yet, at a size nobody can fix until the pen is laid out. The footing line here is an intention, not a quote.

Money spent puts numbers in this section — the lengths and cost of the stick and flag, and what the fabric and stone came to over what area — each with the date it was bought. The rest of what this page is about cannot be bought at all: working the point of balance, an alley that lights right, footing that holds when it is wet and an animal is in a hurry. That is the part the tag is for. Research stays at the top until cattle have been through a pen here.

Before you buy

• Spend on footing and layout before anything you can carry. The order matters more than the total.
• Buy a stick and a flag. Skip the prod until you have a problem it answers.
• Walk your empty alley at cow height and remove what shines or flaps, before deciding the gear is at fault.

— Chris D., McEwen, Tennessee