Animal Handling Benefits Your Herd – Cattlemen’s Livestock Auction

At the auction barn or at the farm, proper animal handling is important.

What Exactly is Animal Handling?

Animal handling is a phrase that explains how people work with, respond to, and interact with animals. Animal handling skills are any procedures used to approach, manipulate, and keep an animal calm, as well as any approaches of restraint used to protect yourself and others. Animal handling is something you have to learn for yourself, over time and through lots of practice.

Why is Proper Handling Important?

Proper animal handling is an essential part of good animal husbandry. It benefits the animals you care for, creates a desirable working atmosphere, and benefits the customers you serve. Proper handling techniques help maintain high production quality, and it effectively reduces stress on cattle and people. It also reduces stress on facilities and equipment and leads to better management of your farm or ranch. Successful producers pay close attention to the things that impact their herd and play important roles in the unique management of each herd.

What are Some Basic Handling Techniques?

Most animals respond to calm, gentle, and consistent handling. Livestock become uneasy when their ordinary routines or familiar surroundings change. Livestock, especially cattle and sheep, are herd animals. They may become stressed when isolated and will try to return to the group. Livestock detect people by their movement, which is much more important to animals than what is moving. A handler’s excited or aggressive movements may cause animals to stop and watch the activity rather than respond to the handling. Therefore, it is important to move calmly and steadily when handling animals. Cattle and sheep see objects in black and white. Cattle have a panoramic field of vision, which means they can see everything around them except what is directly behind their hindquarters. If approached from the rear, they may be startled. Cattle have limited depth perception and judge distance poorly. Shadows may appear as holes, so they sometimes balk at sharp contrasts in light. Chute and alley walls should have flat surfaces to minimize this reaction. Diffuse lighting, which reduces bright spots and shadows, helps quiet animals. Livestock move more comfortably from dark to light areas than the reverse.

These techniques are used at Cattlemen’s Livestock Auction and even on our owners’ personal farms. We want cattle that enter the ring to be calm and in return, get you a better cow price. Stressed cattle can make buyers leery and worry about the overall health of the animal. Our sorting staff is experienced and will always have the well being of your cattle in mind.