good evening and welcome to tonight's webinar on cattle handling with professor temple grandin i'm steve west from ahdb dairy and i'll introduce you to temple in just a moment just go through some housekeeping explain the background to what we have in store for you over the next few weeks on this subject all of you are muted and this webinar is being recorded so you can share it afterwards for dairy farmers registered with dairy pro pre please provide your details um in the message box on the right you can ask questions um and only the organizers will see them so you can ask them in confidence now um the question box is on the right uh it's the box that opens when you click on the orange arrow uh we we have uh around 700 of you listening at this present moment and there there's plenty more coming in so i am expecting a lot of questions so please understand if we don't manage to get to yours uh but don't let that put you off uh we want as many questions as possible and we will put as many as we can to to temple um so this meeting uh is about cattle so of course i'm expecting we've got both beef and dairy levy players listening uh there are two more webinars in the series uh as you can see just over my left shoulder here um next week on the 16th of february at the same time we have neil chesterton the dairy vet behind lame cow consultancy in new zealand and on the 2nd of march we have europe driessen from cow signals in the netherlands now both of these webinars are directed more toward dairy farms but they'll cover different elements of cattle handling that i know temple will touch on today i'm afraid we're not going to be able to record either of those two webinars that are coming up so you must listen live in order to avoid disappointment the details are at the top and i'll go through that a little bit more at the end of the webinar today now one of the challenges with any webinar i think it's a big problem is that um you have a lack of interaction don't you and um we're offering all dairy farmers who are listening the opportunity to sign up to a focus group with miriam parker from livestock wise which will be hosted on microsoft teams on the 24th of february here you can discuss some of the take-home messages that will come out of today's webinar and and we can of course tailor it to to your on-farm environment now places are limited to 30 and details of how to book will be added to the chat box a little bit later in this webinar and i'll tell you a little bit more about that later on and as to how to book um beef farmers we don't want to leave you out uh any any bee farmers who are interested please do email your details to the same same place register your interest and we'll try to fulfill what's needed on another suitable date i'll go into a little bit more detail on that at the end of today but that's enough from me really i i i want to just quickly explain who our speaker is this evening um professor temple grandin of colorado state university now temple grandin is a world renowned animal behaviourist and designer of cattle handling facilities her writings on the flight zone and other principles of grazing behavior have helped many people to reduce stress on their animals during handling globally she has appeared in countless prime time u.s tv programs and publications including people magazine new york times and forbes in fact time manage time magazine named temple as one of the top 100 most influential people in 2010. she has authored over 400 articles and took part in a ted lecture in 2010 entitled the world needs all kinds of minds her life story has also been made into an hbo movie which i'd certainly recommend it's entitled temple grandin and it stars claire danes now this won seven emmy awards and a golden globe in 2017 she was inducted into the women's hall of fame and in 2018 made a fellow by the american association for the advancement of science so it's with great pleasure that i welcome you this evening temple uh and i'll hand over to you to take us through your presentation well it's really great to be here by um by virtual absolutely wonderful and i want to talk to you about done stockmanship and cattle handling and there'll be quite a few beef cattle in here but a lot of the things i talk about are the same for all animals and i want to go to our next slide which shows something that appeared on our campus and the reason why i'm showing this is i want to talk about the importance of becoming a really good observer those are eclipse shadows through a tree and the tree acts like little pinhole cameras well i didn't know eclipses made these weird shadows i noticed these shadows i watched probably a hundred students walk over this this was right in front of our library they didn't see these weird shadows that the eclipse was making and it's really important for in stockmanship to be a good observer i know you're going to have cow signals like um a talk and uh he talks about the importance of observing you know the animals body posture and other things i'm a visual thinker everything i think about is a picture it's not words animals live in a sensory-based world not a word-based world and cattle are very very sensitive to things they see little things that move rapidly that might scare them things that we would tend to not notice like a little cup on the ground a paper towel hanging out of a rack the next slide shows some really really calm totally free cattle handling uh there's no fear now we talk about animals getting agitated well that's fear animals feel fear animals definitely do have emotions there's some no fear you lead them around with the feed bucket now when you got them that team you got to be really careful about their manners you cannot have these heavy animals pushing and shoving on people and one of the mistakes that people make is they'll put the feed down when they're pushing and shoving then you've rewarded pushing and shoving so if you're changing pastures you wait until they stand back a little bit and then you open the gate they've got to ask nicely now the next picture shows um i took down in mexico a lot of years ago and you get a horse there gonna get really stressed i think the guy just got his pride hurt but with a saddle suddenly coming off the horse and i hadn't had the camera either right at the right time or maybe the wrong time no matter how you want to look at this but something sudden like that saddle coming off that's really scary that's sudden novelty and uh once an animal gets really frightened it takes 20 to 30 minutes for him to calm back down so maybe it might be a good time to take a break but sudden novelty when i worked in a dairy one day the cattle were just freaking they wouldn't come into the milking parlor and the problem was somebody hung a yellow raincoat up in there that had never been there before next slide shows some of the signs of fearful cattle the first thing they'll do is put their head up looking all around ears pin back and then the next thing they'll do is they'll start to switch their tails so they'll tell you when they get ready to kick you and then when they start pooping they're really scared because you're scared that you know what out of them and when you see eye white though on some of the holsteins the way their eyes are made you can see eye white naturally but on other breeds of cattle you see eye white they are getting scared and it's sort of like a pot coming to a boil and then kaboom you're working with training animals and training a horse they start to switch their tail you might want to end the training session before he bucks you off now i'm going to show you some lighting things now this next slide shows going straight into the sun you've all been out on the motorway where you had to drive directly into the sun and it was just awful i you might want to change the time of day that you load the trailer so you can avoid going into the sun time of day it can make a big difference another thing that can make a big difference is shadows my student um dennis wilson just um finished up a survey and he found that when the sun made really sharp shadows of maybe the bars of fences cattle that had not been in that facility before it would bark at it now you know dairy you might have a drain on the floor the old cow will just walk right over it but the new heifer she's going to stop at it give her a chance to look at it so get down in your facilities and see what they're seeing and right here they can see a car parked outside the facility vehicles parked along facilities can often be a problem there's also a little red piece of string little things we tend to not notice they will notice and in a dairy the animals that are going to notice this the most are the new heifers the next slide shows a chain hanging down yep an animal that's first coming in gonna block at that also objects can change how they look when they change position another one of my students megan corgan just got finished doing a study with horses where she walked them by a children's playset and after they got used to walking by it she rotated it and it became a new object think about it let's say we had a giant you know three meter long stapler this is what it looks like this way looks different this way see when you turn it it looks different well you have an object that looks different when you turn it the animal might treat it as a new object the next slide shows going into dark building this can be especially a problem on bright sunny days at night you put lights inside this building the cows are going to go in there just fine um on a real bright sunny day you can have have a problem because their eyes have to adjust i call this the dark movie theater effect now i haven't been to a movie for over a year because of covert but you can all remember i'm going in a dark theater and you can't see anything well the animal is the same way so the next slide shows things that you could do about this you can put in some translucent panels so they can see some light through the building they can see light through the building they'll go in there more easily my next slide shows animals stopping at a at a water puddle on a pasture and what you need to do here is give that leader a chance to put the head down and take a look at the water if you push the leader when they've got the head down they're not going to go you got to wait for the leader to bring the head back up then you push and you go i don't have time for that well you have time for them to turn back on you let the leader look at the puddle and then the the leader will go across and then the other cattle will follow the next slide shows a backstop gate uh at the entrance to a chute and off or race we'll use the term race those cause more problems than they solve because they don't like going through them so in this situation you might want to put a remote control rope on that backstop gate so you can hold it open for the cap and then close it behind them it's a little remote control rule really really simple the next slide emphasizes the importance of bringing up small groups this is especially important on you know when you're doing vaccinations people bring too many up and and what i have to find out you know whenever i work with beef cattle is i have to find out what's the correct number to bring up and people also put too many into the holding pens the milking parlor too and jam them in there good handling is going to require more walking so i've got this cute little picture of one dog walking the other dog um because they really do handling well you're going to need to bring up small groups and that's going to take more time people don't want to do the walking and sometimes people say to me well why does temple grand then have to keep talking about the same stuff all the time because people are still bringing too many up and doing other things that we have to keep talking about the next slide i emphasize uh filling the crowd pen half full and i find that that's something i have to constantly stay after people about that bring the small groups up now the next few slides i'm going to show are going to show flight zone principles we go next slide big flock of sheep and you can see how in these animals that are not completely tame the flight zone makes a bubble and there's a number of people teaching low stress handling that talk about how to position yourself so that the animals will just flow around the bubble and the size of that bubble is going to vary now of course that animal that was so tame that the lady could lay on top of that that is no flight zone at all those you're gonna have to lead but what affects the size of this bubble is amount of contact with people the genetics of the animal the more flighty animals will stand further back also the quality of the handling is it quiet and low stress or is it rough the next slide shows using the bubble concept to move some animals out of a pen and you can see there how they just flowing around the bubble now on my website brandon.com i got lots of free videos and stuff on grandin.com i actually have a video of this same slide and you can see how the cattle walk around the bubble all right let's go to the next slide now this next slide on the flight zone is kind of a busy slide and i don't have any way of using pointer unfortunately but the dotted curved lines shows a single file race that the animal would walk through and you've got a point of balance at the shoulder now the big mistake i see people do is stand at the head and poke them on the butt this is another thing i have to keep talking about because people still keep making these same mistakes now there was a big survey done in the us and texas that went to 39 feed yards and they looked at how well people handled cattle and you still had 20 or 30 percent of the people that stand at the head and poke it on the butt and you're telling it to go forward and backwards at the same time now the gray area on that represents the flight zone if you stand inside the flight zone on some animals are going to get kind of excited and then the dotted line is way out on the very edge of the flight zone so the next slide i'm going to be able to show you sort of three different zones that are around the animals these black cattle are moving away i've penetrated their flight zone but notice that the tan light colored animal is looking at me he knows i'm there then you've got some other cattle far away that they don't pay any attention to me so there's kind of two zones there's the flight zone where they move away but then there's a zone of influence a zone of awareness or a pressure zone people call it different things but there's the flight zone when you move away and then there's the zone of yeah i want to look at you i'm aware that you're there and they'll tend to turn and look at you and stay just outside the flight zone the next slide shows a very handy way to get animals to move forward when they're in a single file race and this is a really good thing to use and it'll enable you to get rid of a lot of electric prods and other bad things these diagrams are on my website grandin.com just my last name brandon.com and what you do is you walk quickly back past the shoulder in the opposite direction of desired movement kind of counter-intuitive but it works you start using this you'll be amazed at how well you can move cattle and put away some of the driving aids that you shouldn't be using now of course in a dairy i don't want to see any electric prods and the one thing i never want to say is electric pride is someone's primary driving tool get them out of your hands the next slide shows up a race that has a solid outer fence so that when people park the vehicles all along there um they don't see the vehicles now if you have an open sight on the chute you have to kind of imagine that the flight zone comes out sort of like a force field remember that picture i showed off that bubble and if you stand in that in that bubble when they're in there they're gonna start getting agitated maybe jump around maybe start pooping and you have to stay outside of their flight zone until it's time to move them you can walk in there move them and then back up i have found in a facility like this where you have an open side i can draw a line in the dirt and if i stand inside the line they start to get agitated or fearful back up outside the line then they stay calm and the next slide shows why you need to have a solid outer fence there's a picture i took down in australia so that's why the truck looks very different but as the cattle came up the single file race to get vaccinated they could see the big truck there and this feed yard had two facilities exactly the same design this one there was a lot of walking and backing up and the other one worked but the other facility was inside a building so the cattle didn't see things the next slide shows an animal rearing in a single file race and the reason why that animal's rearing is because the handler is too close that animal's trying to get away so what you need to do is back up get out of the flight zone the next slide i just talked about the optimal length for a single file race i want to have it long enough so i can use some following behavior so i put a few animals in there and following behavior is a really important thing to use i want to wait until it's almost empty then when i bring up the next bunch of cattle they just go right on in they go right on in now here's another little trick you can try with a piece of cardboard that i show on my next slide um i've got a squeeze shoot with open sides and you're standing there working it and you put a piece of cardboard there so an animal coming in with it so they can't see you that can help try experimenting sometimes with pieces of cardboard then you find something that works then you can put something on there that's a little more permanent than cardboard sometimes very simple changes in your facility can make a big difference i cannot emphasize enough the importance of having a non-slip floor it is just essential got to have a non-slip floor temple do you mind if i had just asked a question no problem got quite a few questions coming in um but uh just to break that up um in terms of uh cattle in terms of emotional behavior how where do they i mean you've shown slides with horses you've shown slides with sheep where did cattle sort of sit in terms of emotional behavior compared to pigs horses they all have emotional behavior right and i'm gonna be showing a slide uh no they'll give you a preview we'll wait for that i'll just talk about motions there will be a slide that's going to be coming up where i talk about the pant scap emotions all people and all animals have this i don't know about earthworms but you know okay okay we'll stop we'll things like that you have fear and when you're handling animals most of the problems of fear but another one of the emotions is separation distress that's a separate emotion you take the calf away from the mother and they're upset that's not fear it's actually a different brain system so there's two emotions that when you're handling animals you're going to run into fear and that is a proper scientific word it's been in the neural science literature forever and separation distress like you have one lamb separated from the herd one dairy cow just got off by herself and she's upset about it that's separation distress you know now cloven's been really really good for on animals um but now when one of my friends uh got a really nice dog and she got a job the dog was home alone it chewed up her pajamas that was that was yesterday that was um separation distress it was certainly not fear uh fear and separation distress are two separate emotional systems and they're both negative they're definitely not positive emotions and when i get to the emotion slide i will go into some of the positive emotions but animals have emotions there's no question about that well i'll hold on to that question then and until um that moment and i'll let you continue temple you want to go on another some other question you said you had a bunch of questions so i'll ask you another quick one then while we're actually let's just so you you've talked about the leader cow um the the cow that needed to see the water the puddle yeah what how do you recognize the leader cow well the leader cow and the dominant cow at the feed trough are not the same count the leader cow and this spring gets into emotions kind of a low fear bold cow that likes to explore so there's another one of the jack panscape emotions which is seek and there's actually been research done in cattle where gps colors were put on cattle this was out in new mexico in the state of new mexico on you know really rough range and some cows would go out and graze a lot of pasture and others were lazy and lay around the waterhole so that's going to be a high seek and a low seek and that leader tends to be you know likes to explore probably lower fear now if the herd gets attacked by wolves or dogs or some other predator that dominant cow at the feed trough she will be in the center of the herd where she's protected the dominant cow does not lead the herd across something like water she's going to let somebody else do that i mean think about the wildebeest herds in africa well the dominant cow is going to let the crocodiles get or the alligators or whatever get somebody else see i see no that's tremendous i i've got a few more questions but i'm going to hold on to those temple because i know what's coming later on so i'll i'll leave you to continue some some more slides let's do a few more slides now this just um this was a a study in in brazil um and she did some simple improvements on their corrals the cardboard that i showed you also simple changes in the cattle handling no yelling and screaming yelling and screaming at cattle is very stressful it has intent they know you're mad at them where something like a hydraulic pump running doesn't have intent i want to get rid of dogs around the shoots and she got rid of electric prods and the stress hormone the cortisol stress hormone was significantly reduced and another thing is non-slip flooring i cannot emphasize enough how important that is now let's go on to the next slide because we're going to get into now talking about some facility things and when i first started in the industry in the 70s and 80s a lot of our cattle were extremely wild and in the last 20 years in beef cattle in the u.s there's been a lot of selection for calmer temperament a lot of the cattle we have now do not get scared as easily as some of the cattle we had 20 years ago so i used to put solid sides on just everything but now now that we've calmed some of these animals down and then dairies you can have a facility with an open side but it's going to require more stockmanship skill and i would strongly recommend covering the outer perimeters and most of these places have buildings around them with walls on them so that acts as a solid outer wall um but you have to respect that flight zone that kind of will be like a force field that's going to come out through the fence and it requires more skill the next slide shows some curve systems that i have designed and i can't emphasize enough the importance of correct layout this is shown on my website um has to be laid out correctly now catalan shape have a natural tendency to want to go back to where they came from that's one of the reasons why curve shoot works because they go on around back to where they come from another reason why it works is when they enter that single file they can't see the people standing around with the vaccinating stuff let's go to the next slide this is a really important slide and it shows the right way and a wrong way to lay out a curve facility and if you do it according that dotted line it will not work it's got to be laid out correctly and the radius or the size of the gate for the um crowd pen i i like one that's 3.5 meters or 12 feet you can go down to 3 meters or ten feet do not make them smaller than three meters and these crown pens laid out in a full half circle so they come on around and they go back to where they came from the next slide shows a very simple little curved facility a lot of people have been asking me to come up with some things that are less expensive this layout's on my website it's also my book um temple grandin's guide to working with farm animals which is available electronically on amazon and other sites um but the way this works is you stand at the pivot of the crowd gate and you put the crowd gate on the first notch and then the cattle just come on around you and you're not on the catwalks i'm 73 years old now i have a hard time getting on and off those catwalks and i um i really like this i call it working the pivot and there's a lot more information on this in grandin.com another thing that's nice about this layout is a lot of buildings have a series of poles to hold up the roof and it's very easy to put this design in and have the poles go down the middle part of it so you don't have to modify the building again solid outer side and then a partially open on inner side now i'd rather put a solid side at least this far up on the bottom i want to keep the feet inside of it i'd recommend that the next slide shows another simple design where you can work the pivot it's also on my website and you work that whole inner part of that but and the solid black line is a solid on outer fence but again you've got to respect that flight zone that's extending out there and only enter it when you want to move them now a lot of people ask me all the time about the bud box and this is something that's very very simple to build on the next slide very simple to build but oh now that's gotten the slide's been compressed i want to tell you right now the butt box is not a square some the computer has compressed this slide for some reason um my books have got uh you know diagram of this done correctly it's a rectangle but you still are using the same principle of going back to where they come from now this is an example of a design it's very economical to build but it requires more stockmanship skill especially if you're in there with you also absolutely cannot overfill it you don't store cattle in it and you don't overfill it you bring them in the back gate you step through the back gate and they circle around you remember how i showed you that bubble earlier and they fill up the single file shoot and what you put in the box has to fit in the chute you don't want one left over going crazy because then you're going to get the separation distress problem and that can get dangerous and you don't store cattle in this it does take more skill to use but it's very very very economical to build you can make it out of portable panels and we'll go on the next slide how about driving aids now there's some people now working on low stress handling that recommended out in the pastures and places like this you don't even need driving aids and one of the reasons why they recommend this is because people just can't stop doing this and so they'll get them out there and have their hands at their side and just use slight positions of their body now one place where i like a flag like that is where you can reach into a crowd pen from the outside and you turn an animal and not have to be in there with them but you want to use it just slightly like this not flapping people seem to have a natural instinct to want to flap their arms the next slide shows a survey that was done in the u.s and they found that in places where they used electric prods all the time you had a lot more stumbling vocalization a lot of handling problems another thing that showed up in this survey is they had a lot of problems with vocalization and hydraulic squeeze shoots and that's because they got the pressure too tight you need to adjust hydraulic restraint equipment so that you'll automatically stop squeezing at a reasonable pressure if an animal vocalizes when you squeeze it you're hurting it you need to put less pressure on it the next slide just shows some more you know curved facilities and i'm emphasizing about um keeping the outer perimeter solid and the next slide i just talk about design concepts there's kind of two ways that i can design things i can do something very simple like the bud box very economical but requires more skill or i can do one of my curve facilities a little more expensive but they're easier for less skilled people to use and and you're and then and the people are not in with the cat about it i did the next slide i discussed some behavioral principles of restraint i've already talked about non-slip flooring i'm optimal pressure you gotta hold it tight enough so it feels held i if you're using a squeeze shoot where but with it where squeezes you've got to make sure you don't throw your animal off balance if you throw it off balance it's going to start to one get scared and then that piece of cardboard that i showed over the side of the chute um that's an example of something very simple i did and it made the cattle come in more easily and i'd experiment sometimes with pieces of cardboard um because it can be a vehicle or i've seen cars going by on the road will cause blocking the next slide shows a really nice non-slip floor we've already talked a lot about that but now i want to test your power of observation now i don't have any way of knowing if 887 people uh out there when they raise their hands but if i was doing it live i would ask you raise your hand if you if you noticed when i first put this slide up here that that animal was looking at the sunbeam now it's obvious i've told you when i chose children this slide over half of them will notice this but this is the sort of stuff that would make a new heifer balk and refuse to move in the milking parlor where if you had a sunbeam like this the old cows will just walk over they've learned that that's not going to hurt them i was wondering i just saw you come up on the video do you have a question i will ask one actually because it is related to this um so what would you recommend as a non-slip flooring i see she's got a mat to step on to as she there's a lot of different non-slip flooring options that's a mat that will not be available in the uk and now we've got a new company called animat now at home that sell different maps there's a lot of different things available on my website i show groov concrete uh the steel rods we still have to use that in some places because it's all they can get uh you could even just use sand now i we had a nice nice discussion about corrective actions in our meat plants and i might use sand in a meat plant to fix it icy loading ramp that day but i don't want to be putting sand on that on that loading ramp all the time i'm gonna have to put put a better thing on it than sand so sand might be short-term corrective action but on a rubber mat might be my long-term uh corrective action there's a lot of different things and one of the simplest things you can do is simply score slipping and falling if you've got animals slipping and you've got animals falling you've either got a slippery floor problem you've you're getting them too excited or maybe they're lame so those are three things that you would need to fix and the next slide shows handling scoring and i like this um data that was collected at some of our large beef feed yards now electric pride use i want that really low um but you have a lot of animals slipping and falling or stumbling that's uh going down and one knee uh going down on the ground or miscaught on vocalizing when you restrain them you've got things that you need to fix now this was done with beef cattle now right now we're getting beef cattle bigger and bigger heavier at a younger age on breeding more from me and we've been getting heart attack problems and we've been getting uh leg and foot problems i think we have to be careful how much we push animals for productivity we're going to start looking at what's optimal because i've got to have an animal i can handle and if i got an animal that's on leg problems that can make it very difficult to handle it it's not going to want to walk because it's sore now i want to just tell you one little thing normal cattle lay like this when they lay on their chest or on the sternum they lay like this on the sternum if one leg is sticking out like this they are sore because this is the normal way when they rest on their chest or their sternum and if they're dog sitting with their butt on the ground and their two front legs like this they're really sore and that applies to shape too and i've been seeing more problems with lameness it's just um it's a variety of factors causing it and when i did my improving animal welfare practical approach third edition book which incidentally has just come out improving animal welfare a practical approach third edition published by cabbie in the uk i looked up the lameness statistics for the uk and i have bad news it's not uh it's not improved very much we still have to do a lot more work on this and if you measure likeness then you see it if you don't measure it you tend to underestimate it let's go on to the next slide and that shows some very first work that we did on cattle temperament and an animal that rated number four was an animal that got extremely fearful and agitated in the squeeze shoot when we restrained it and it had lower weight gains and when we did this 25 years ago this was radical stuff this has been replicated a whole bunch of times animal temperament matters the next slide shows the core emotional systems this is the jack panscape emotional systems already talked about fear then you have anger usually that's not the problem with cattle except the bull you go out in the pasture and the bull comes after you that's not fear in fact the worst bull for going after people is an orphan hand reared pet because when he grows up and he's got to prove he's the big man of the herd he does it on people usually men with very very tragic bad results so orphan bull tabs get them in with a group of other cat they got to grow up knowing that they are cattle and then you have seek i already discussed that and then of course you've got sex drive and you've got mother young nurturing and caring you've got that licking the calf and then you've got play and these are scientifically you know determined emotional systems both genetics and experience affects these an animal with high fear genetics i don't care whether it's a horse a dog any kind of an animal if you suddenly introduce novelty like an umbrella opening animal with a flighty genetics will have a bigger reaction than the animal with the common genetics the next slide on shows a really nice purebred brahmin these actually have a if you treat them right they really like stroking by people i'll give you a little hint don't pat animals like this stroke it stroke it make it feel like the mother's tongue the next slide shows uh cortisol levels during restraint and what i want to get across in this slide is that when you just force animals to do stuff it really stresses them and when animals are trained to cooperate like dairy cows are then you don't get the fear stress and when you force them you get all kinds of fear stress stockmanship matters let's go to the next slide it's really important that a heifer's first experience with something new like the milking room is a good first experience because if it's first experience has fallen on our butt you might have problems so first experiences with new people new equipment like like milking room and new vehicles like a trailer need to be good first experiences and there's been some work on acclimating heifers to the milking parlor but one of the mistakes they made is they didn't feed them all the robot milking now they feed them biggest mistake we made we made this back in the 80s in the us was taking out taking feed out of the milking parlor you know what's happening people are learning they need to put it back in you know there's some sometimes that uh you know you know the young students are coming in now and they're going to reinvent something that we should have never have taken out let's go to the next slide i'm i can't emphasize the importance of stockmanship there's all kinds of research both old research and new research that shows that good stockmanship really pays and uh miriam parker is an excellent stock person you're going to be hearing from her she would agree with me on this stockmanship doesn't get enough credit go on to the next slide now the thing about a new thing is if i take something like a camera box or a tripod and i put it out in the middle of the pasture the cat will come up to it so novelty is attractive when they can voluntarily approach it and it's scary if you just suddenly shove it in their face and so one of the best ways to introduce animals to new things is to let them approach it and i get asked all the time well my heifer was good at home and when i showed her at the show she went berserk well let's get her used to some of the things at the show like flags bikes and balloons the next slide just shows an umbrella and uh and a canvas and if you train a cow to tolerate the umbrella that doesn't transfer to the tarp or the canvas they're totally different things and they look completely completely different let's go to the next slide dogs around the working area i just cannot stand them now i've seen really good dogs out in the field the border collie type of dogs in the field but around the where i'm going to be vaccinating them it just makes the animals crazy the next slide i just talk about the importance of acclimating animals to one different people different vehicles because some of the worst cattle to go berserk when they go somewhere anew are the ones that have lived to shelter to life and they've only seen one farmer and one truck they've no they haven't seen anything else new you take them to a new place and they get completely scared let's go to the next slide you manage things that you measure we can measure handling we can also measure things like lameness body condition i've got a student right now working on under edema which is a non-infectious swelling of the utter this is another problem that's creeping up on us so we get more and more high-producing cows and this occurs where there's no infection let's take the milker off and my student owns a dairy and that's one of the reasons why she decided to study this and a lot of people don't even realize that it exists you you measure things it prevents bad from becoming normal and i think lameness is one of those things where bad became normal now this just shows how i made some changes in some handling equipment and i reduced the vocalization on the big bar graph there i reduced pressure on the neck applied by a head stanchion and when i did this uh then the moving went away i put a light on an entrance because they didn't want to go into that dark movie theater and then um less cattle were vocalizing because they weren't poking them with electric products let's go to the next slide now this is uh mcdonald's audits that i did in the u.s and we scored meat packing plants on that performance and when i first started and collected baseline data for the usda captive bolt stunning was atrocious because the equipment was broken and then when you had big buyers looking at this then things got a whole lot better a whole lot better and a lot of the things that we did to improve the handling scores vocalization slipping and falling a lot of nonsense flooring a lot of training a lot of very very simple things let's go to the next slide now there's kind of three different types of animal welfare standards and the tendency now is to go with what's called an animal based outcome standard lameness would be that slipping and falling is an outcome standard i'm not going to tell you how to build a floor but i can measure slipping and falling and i'll tell you one thing that does not work just a little bit of a rough broom finish on concrete does not work that gets slick and the oie is going to be going more towards an outcome based variables and i know that fsa the eu are going more towards outcome-based variables some of this has been delayed by covin then you have some practices you just forbid i do a lot of work with large customers and we've got to have some very clear thou shalt knots and if you do these thou shalt knots um then you may norm may not be a supplier any longer and getting away from input measures like telling you exactly how to build a cubicle in in a bar for a cow to lay it now there's something wrong with that cubicle then she's likely to be dirty or have swollen joints or be like let's go the next slide now here are some of the critical control points for cattle will handling scoring that's going to be one of them swollen leg joints lameness filthy dirty animals embedded pack systems we've got to make sure you put enough bedding in there so your animals stay clean body condition ammonia levels i just i've uh you just about have to measure that with a meter but everything is an outcome measure there except the ammonia measures heat stress if cattle at rest breathe with their mouth open they are too hot period and coat condition we've been using that in organic operations and you know where people get to a customer looking at lice and stuff like that and thinking that's normal no that's not normal um so you're gonna need to have a nice coat on your animals these are very very easy things to look at so what are kind of the steps for improving animal welfare the first thing i got to do to improve it is i got to make sure no acts of abuse are going on you know the animal activists are getting into more and more places and what they just did one they just recently got into a chicken growing place and they showed us pictures of uh you know little chicks that were having problems they were having a harder and harder time actually finding something wrong with a grower uh implementing scoring and then in cattle we don't really have to worry too much about behavior needs in dairy cattle uh this is a bigger problem in the laying hand and in the pegs and do animals have positive emotions i'll tell you how to find some positive emotions with dairy cattle go on to youtube and look up a cow motorized grooming brush and i'm not supposed to say the science that cows love these brushes but when you watch these videos they obviously love these brushes and they'll line up and wait to use it you know so that's positive emotions so it's not enough just to prevent abuse or to prevent suffering we also have to look at it and go are we giving those animals a good life you know this is the five domains from david mellor which has a lot of similarities to welfare quality and he's added you know the importance of looking at see animal have a life worth living you know have some time to have some some experiences of things that would like to do and i think i got one last slide and that's my website grandin.com and everything on that is free and we are now open up for questions and we've got um um we got over half an hour for questions that's fantastic that's the the fantastic pace of those slides too so thank you temple i think we've we've got we've covered a lot of ground there in just those few minutes um but we have had a lot of questions um we so the the the word in the uk of course is tb those two words um tb testing how could we make that a less stressful scenario so if you can imagine the vets up at the head end of the animal they are clipping uh in one particular area and injecting two inoculants and that's probably not you're not going to train them for really painful procedures the worst cattle i ever saw to get them into a facility was somewhere too many students had palpated them and you could not get them out of the crowd worst cattle worse than anything i've seen at the slaughterhouse they were the worst but something that's just a bit uncomfortable and painful and they can get acclimated to it feed them a reward when they come out feed them a reward they're doing that in brazil right now with the really a flighty um uh the lower cattle and matias uh lacostas are doing that um give them a reward see it goes back to why did we take feeding out of the milking parlor i thought it was the stupidest thing we ever did because there's a study that was done when they tried to acclimate hephaestus running through there before they started milking and and the more flighty heifers got stressed you feed them in there no you come out of there and you're gonna get it like you get a half a coffee cup some delicious grain it's a treat that you're not not normally allowed to have that's a whole lot on that but that's not to use something that they've learned from experience is a trait boy i can tell you for our cats the thing i call cooner flakes comes from the local feed yard in one of my labs i couldn't figure out why we couldn't get the cattle to leave the cattle handling building they kept turning to the right there was a big bucket of cooner flakes over there i didn't know about and they were smelling them they wanted them they didn't care how many students were in that cattle handling barn cooner flakes are just so yummy that's the name of a local feed yard now when you say it it it seems so clear because we do it with our dogs don't we so um we could easily give them a last treat i think giving them some treats and because that's it that's not going to be a painful procedure like too many students doing palpation it happened about 15 years ago and that professor no longer works here but they were in one of my labs 15 they were the worst cattle and you couldn't get them a single file i had to have three of the guys push them in they would not go but the tv thing isn't that you know what it's a clippers are a bit scary and i'm but we can acclimatize it's an uncomfortable procedure but i see so so actually there's a question related to that um it's about negative experiences for that animal like you you touched on it when you were saying about um make sure you run heifers through through the milking parlor get them used to it without any negative experiences and i'm assuming this could be included in that so how do you stop cattle from bulking at the head yolk so in a new handling setup cattle some of the worst count of a blocking at the head yoko ones have been bashed on the head by it i actually did a little study on that we had some bulls that we had to work every 30 days so i went down and i kept track of who got accidentally hit with the head head holder and the ones that got hit with the head holder they'd go in the squeezing part and they come up the head holder and they're going like this they remembered they remembered and the other thing it's just so important i want animals walking up the head yolk not running and i just um been uh doing my class and i've been getting a lot of discussion on the on the discussion board about animals uh hitting the head gate or the head yolk uh too hard well have bring them in quietly this is where the person is working the back end is important you know you have a bunch of yelling and screaming and like then they're gonna come in there fast i want them walking in no i see i see no well so i mean it related to that i mean we we've spoken about um a wild cattle or cattle that perhaps would go a bit too quick into the into the head yoke what about aim cattle if you bang them on the head with it hard they're going to remember that because the thing that was interesting the animal knew exactly which part of that restraint apparatus was bad and they went into the squeezing part fine but the part this part here instead of getting them here had got them here and they remembered that i call it nutcrackering them they got bashed here and they remembered yeah no i can i can believe it i think we've all seen it and it's um it's never pleasant um but the other end of the spectrum if you if you've got a herd of dairy cows in there perhaps you think they're too quiet they're difficult you can never get them to move anywhere is that a problem is that a bad thing well then there's a point where you gotta use feed to move them and uh they'll go in if they're gonna get fed and then in the 70s one of the big innovations we had was dairy cow didn't want to leave the stalls so they had these things called automatic feed bowl covers that where a little gate would swing over and cover up the feed bowl to get her to leave and then in the 80s they just took it all out and now i think we're realizing that this is a mistake because when the robotic milking came in that's all got feed in it no i see i see no really i i can i mean you often see it don't you um i know when we've spoken in the past on the lead up to this webinar we were talking about what what characteristics are best for people who are working with animals what characteristics would would you say make the best stock people well calm person there's an old study was done years ago by a guy named seabrook and he found the confident introvert made one of the best dairy stock people and sort of happy charlie kind of excited done you know wasn't wasn't so good but some people just have a real way with animals also there is a confidence uh if you're afraid of them they pick up and you kind of approach them with a confidence they pick up on that they're very sensitive to body language and uh no but some people are much better stock people than others and um there's a professor here new professor named courtney daigle at texas a m university and and one thing she's working on is try to improve the status of the stock people it's not just a job flunkies you know i've been in this industry for a long time and there's some places that are raising that the status and the pay of the really good stock person because stocksmanship matters what i have learned is when i was out there selling equipment all over the place i found it was easy to sell equipment people want the thing more they want the management and i put a lot of equipment out there and some of my clients tore it up and wrecked it because they thought they could save everything they could just buy capital investments that would solve their problems magically i don't care if it's equipment whether it's computers or drugs you know whatever and getting people to manage things right it's hard and then when i started working with the mcdonald's audience in the meat plants what we did there is we forced them to manage them because most of the stuff we did was simple things like flooring lighting smaller groups training and only three out of 75 plants had to build something expensive and three plant managers had to go and after those uh places got their manager ectomy things greatly improved and that is strictly management i see i see yeah i when i first started in the 70s i used to think i could build self managing cattle handling facilities that is rubbish yes management's got to get behind thanks also we cannot understaff and overwork if people get too tired and there's been some industry data that's never been published in chickens and in pigs that after six hours spending loading these animals out people got tired and the deads went up i see no i can believe it yeah i think it's a it's a common problem and we never we never give ourselves enough time to do some of these jobs um as well you always think it's gonna be a quick job but it's uh it ends up being more difficult the whole thing slowers faster yes and the other thing is slower as you're less likely to end up in the hospital too or get an animal hurt yeah yes so another question here about uh about the bud box i'm really interested to see that gordy jones spoke about that when he was over several years back and i've seen it really successfully used but do you ever get the problem where cows become acclimated to using that same handling system that same blood box and therefore they say oh well i know this drill i'm i'm not gonna i'm i'm not gonna play anymore place where a bud box doesn't work very well is when you've got cattle that absolutely don't want to go in there like a hospital where you've had the you know beef feed yard hospital uh because you've got to make the bud box really work right you've got to have some flights on a little bit so you get that circling around you the other thing is you absolutely cannot store cattle in it what you put in the box must immediately turn around and fill up the lead-up race with no leftovers that's really really important that's why some people use those double alleys because the user is going to force you to better stockmanship because it won't work at all if you don't use it right now that other little layout i showed where you come on around that is um that kind of does some of the same things as the bud box does where you stand at the pivot point of the single file shoot let's say maybe just hold this up here one of my books right here um i don't know how well you can see this but this little layout right here um you stand at the pivot point of the crowd gate and you kind of do some sort of the same thing as the bud box not in there with them and then if you need i like to put the crowd gate on the first notch and just leave it there i see you'll see and and that done but you cannot overfill a bud box and you i mean if five cattle fit in your lead-up race that's how many you put in the bud box you'll put six in the blood box never left over i'm with you no i i think it makes makes complete sense you have to have on you have to have a man gate so that you can uh get out of there easily a little small like gate for a person that you shut the back crowd gate regardless of the design should be solid and these designs are you know they're in this and then well they're in my guide to working with farm animals and it's quicker there's a lot of drawings online where that's wrong and i don't know what the computer did to that diagram of the blood box but it's not the square somehow compressed it it didn't do it to the other other slides no i think that's okay i think it just went wrong with that picture but i think we've got pictures in there they're on this website of yours as well when we can they're on they then they're in here i've got one in here that's uh show you one that's laid out correctly because okay here's a bud box that's laid out correctly yeah this image is like coming backwards there it is laid out correctly i see i see and and uh and then the curve facilities have to be laid out correctly no definitely i think uh there's a lot of drawings that people put online that aren't the scale either these drawings in guide to working with farm animals are to scale i see i see so so thank you for that i think we've we've covered some of the cattle handling um points um do you have any thoughts on whistling to move cattle i mean you often see that that used with both with dairy and beef cattle i'd rather not do it you know i'd rather just be really quiet maybe a little and um i had to stop one of my students from doing that with our beef cat because it got them too too hot i think we need to try to get away from noise coming out of our mouths as much as we can i'm not going to say never do it but most time you don't need to do that no no i understand i yeah there's a difference between walking between some dairy cows and talking to them so they know you're there yeah that's fine that's fine but arm waving yelling i'm you know when you whistle at them all the heads come up the ears go up and you know absolutely question whether you really need to do that there is a question about kicking cattle or not not us the cattle kicking us um how can you stop a cow kicking you when you walk past see just when you walk past she's kicking you yes um well then there's a point where you have to decide you're going to keep that cow or not just one cow and she can't see you yeah there may be something in her in her past that we're she doesn't like you now you i mentioned the utter edema and that can make the other sore and there can be no mastitis present and they might kick at you because they're sore yes yeah and you mentioned i am and kicking at you see this is why in in troubleshooting behavior problems i got to know exactly where the kicking is taking place because walking by kicking at you something totally different than kicking a milker off absolutely no i i think we you do occasionally get a rogue rogue animal that'll do it but you spoke about dogs um earlier oh dogs train cattle to kick you get cattle in a like in a single file race and a dog biting it that will train them to kick you this is one of the reasons why i don't like dogs and even train you to kick with both back feet and i've had beef cattle almost twice kill me that have been bitten by dogs and both back feet came flying up and one of one of those feet got a guy's hat and flipped it up in the air yeah it's happened to me out in the field working the flights zone really nice i'm i'm fine with that that's good i've seen that but dogs biting in cattle where they can't get away all it does is teach them to kick and then i might have to get rid of the cows he's just too dangerous absolutely no i yeah i can i can see what you mean it's happened to me as well um we've we've spoken quite a lot about cows um i'm getting a few questions about carbs one of the problems with a calf is one of the first times you handle it you put a tag in its ear it's a negative experience how can we make that first experience of being handled more positive if you do it the day it's born that calf is so young it may not remember now once it gets to be a month old it's going to remember but when it's first born i i don't think they remember i get asked that question all the time okay so so with that in mind are there is there any difference in the way that you might handle carbs up to four months old compared to handling cattle or they just mini cattle well they're four months old they're starting to turn into mini cattle now real little calves um now calves a month old is going to remember stuff but when you're doing it you know like right when they're born i i don't think they remember it and i've been asked that question that question a whole lot now there has been some research on on dehorning with with a pain relief and the research is very clear it reduces the stress hormones and it reduces pain related behaviors and another problem you've got with cattle since they're a pre-species animal they tend to cover up the fact that they hurt if they know you're watching yes unless they really trust the stock person if they really trust the stock person then they may show you they're hurting but i saw a situation one time where i hid in a scale house and they were castrating some bulls and uh and they were rolling around on the ground ground moaning and when i come out of that scale house they jumped up and acted normal they didn't know i was in the scale i saw one in there before they brought the cattle up but if they they sheep are really bad about this that's why people say find a day dead tomorrow yes as they cover up the their prey species animal they don't want to tell that potential predator that they're hurting and so they see you coming a lot of times covered up now of course some of these lame dairy cattle can't cover it up but these animals i was shocked about moaning on the ground jumped up and acted normal no i i think i think it's it's clear to see we often see it and of course when you push them apply some pressure you know that that slight lameness disappears they they walk away yeah that's right so i'm still getting plenty of questions about handling systems um there's a question about self-locking yokes there's a guillotine yoke and a self-locking yoke do you prefer a self-locking yoke is it some of this personal preference on these yolks but it's really important on a self-locking to adjust it correctly so it doesn't pinch too tight on the neck um i if a really wild beef cattle i probably wouldn't use one of those and then some people will just work it manually you know the bottom line is i want to make sure that i don't bash them with the thing and the thing you've got to be another thing you'll be careful of self-locking is if you adjust it too wide you can then get it locked like with one leg across here like that and that's a terrible mess and they're going to remember that some of this is personal preference there's a a lot of different latches on these devices and you can have ratchet latches they're noisy but they they don't come undone then there's some other types of latches that work with just friction you never oil those and some of these latching mechanisms if they get worn you need to replace them because when they all of a sudden open up suddenly uh levers go flying and people end up their teeth knocked out and end up in the hospital so keeping those latching mechanisms maintains really important no you can but you can see that certainly even just from a health and safety perspective for the the users um there is a question about walking platforms on the outside of shoots i know i've often seen these in larger beef type systems do you have any views on those is that is that a positive or a negative well there's a tendency now for us on some of the facilities that i would put that on the crowd pen um but on the single file what a lot of people are doing now solid on the outside you know most the cattle in the uk and in ireland are gonna be uh not as wild as some of the cattle we may have on far western ranges um and then and no walking platform along the single file race you just work that on the ground and then that this uh diagram that i showed you with the uh where you work the pivot on on this little diagram right here there's no one this uh this is backwards to zoom that's why i'm having a hard time positioning it i there's no walking platform on this except one little place where you might step on a little platform right where the pivot point is because i don't want you putting your hand through the bars because an animal can go and break your forearm i want you reaching over the bars but that would just be a little step up place i see i see yeah so you can now there's other places in big meat plants yeah i'm going to have to have walking platforms you see this different things work well in different places see absolutely so you can manipulate the um the flight zone much more easily from inside the handling facility without having to step up yeah that's right but i want the outer side all closed in either with a building wall one of the worst things to mess up paneling is i'll park the vehicles alongside something with open sides that does not work very well i see so work at all and and uh but like on our facility we have a walking platform and solid sides on the round crowd pen and then along the single file you can work that on the ground and one of the things i have to show the students is don't stand up there on top of that thing right up close those cattle because they're going to get nervous because you're inside their flight zone it's amazing you've got a shoot that's got an open side on it i can back up like a meter or a meter and a half and they calm right down and then i step forward too much i start seeing them jumping around and start doing some pooping and flipping their tails around okay no i see i see um there's there is a question um i'm gonna just make it solid you've got too much commotion going around put walking platforms on it there's just as much activity usually in a banking plan i've got a question about turning left or turning right okay and it's it's it's not about um it's so de cows prefer to go left or right is that a myth or is that true i think the most important thing is if you have two facilities on your property make sure they both turn the same direction now there has been some research on laterality remember when you studied high school biology your eye optic tracks cross so your right eye goes to your left brain your left eye goes to your um right brain and the old thing about right brain left brain people well there's some of this in cattle and the right brain is the side of the brain that like looks for scary stuff and things that might be bad and the left brain sort of more of the seek so when they're kind of afraid of something they'll use the left eye going to the right brain and i now i think if you've got really tame cattle and you've really worked on i think learning will override most of that but they had there was a study done on dairy cattle where they put a man in the exit alley of the milking shed and they tended the ones that were flighty tended to go by them so they could watch them with the left eye because maybe it was bad i see yeah it's called bilaterality actually the interest and i do have a little bit of stuff on this in in temple grant's guide to working with farm animals um if you're interested in looking that stuff up you can go on google scholar and just type in cattle i laterality those three key words but i'm not gonna as of right now um redo every cattle handling facility over this you know in the practical world uh you if you have two uh tall ranchers if you're to have two corrals on your ranch let's have them both work the same way because animals learn the path through it i don't want it going totally different opposite direction in one ground okay no i see no that's that's perfect thank you um i've got some some more questions here about um the i've lost my train of thought there for a moment um so so i i'll ask you this question about um people so why do we have to keep reinforcing these messages um you've you've been doing this now for a number of years and and we we still have to repeat the same messages i think it's a lot like traffic the police still have to have speed cameras and the monitoring speed and monitoring drunk driving and monitoring stopping violations i think it's kind of the same thing what i have found in training people on livestock handling is you've got a few people they are the superb stock person i mean someone like miriam parker then you've got other people where you constantly have to keep um kind of it's sort of like the police have to constantly monitor the speed and then there's a few people that i don't think should be handling livestock they like to be mean to them and when we worked on those mcdonald's now 1999 over 20 years ago i had to get rid of 10 of the people they just would not put the electric prod away then they went to a video auditing and another round of people were gotten rid of because they just would keep poking them with the electric product i've been doing rough things to them i see well i find that they did this survey in texas 39 feed yards two years ago that was a survey done and they found about 60 or 70 percent of the people were doing things right that's good that's a lot better than that would have been 20 years ago or 10 years ago because our cattle association has done lots and lots of low stress handling workshops and lots of stuff on beef quality assurance training people so that's the good news but there's still 20 or 30 to stand in front of the head and poke the butt and put too many cattle in the crowd pen and yell at cattle and bang the side of the facility with stick i see we still had people then i've had people that knew going to the industry oh i was dr grant and she just talks about the same old stuff then that new person comes in spends three years out in the field going around everywhere now i know why temple always talks about the same stuff because she gets frustrated she's gone around all these facilities that her company owns and she's like back there and fix the same stuff don't always have to talk about basics there's a slip there's yeah and you become used to seeing things it flips it's like the speeding would gradually increase yeah and i think traffic rules and stuff is a good way to look at it because can you imagine if the police just stopped on monitoring for drunk driving we'd have car crashes all over the place absolutely no i i think it's a it's a human nature thing a psychology thing there um i'm getting still some more questions about leader cows and we're fine for time we're fine for time for a moment another 10 minutes and i can stay a little longer if you want no well we will aim to we'll finish at half-past eight um but we'll just have another few more questions and then uh so leader and dominant cows um i've got one person who is sending their leader cow the cow they believe is their leader cow away and presumably the herd will then another one will establish itself as as the new leader yeah they will they'll establish a new leader then they take may take some time you see the thing that a lot of people find surprising is that the leader is usually not the dominant cow at the feed trough right no i so i remember you so you said that a moment ago and when you were talking about that um it it appeared like they're the same cow all the time and well they were they are and when we first got numerically numerical ear tags when we first when those got real when they first started getting them and you know rancher go out and buy 200 ear tags numbered like one two three four sequential numbered ear tags they were really shocked that when the cows came back the next year they were almost in the same order coming through the handling shoot for vaccinations because they put these uh sequential numbered ear tags in and i had several ranchers say they were just shocked that they were almost in the same order no that's only i need so it doesn't change so even if groups change that lead account will always well they they if you put enough new cattle in there that's going to change things in another animal but they it's the high seek likes to explore kind of bold that's the one that oftentimes will lead and you'll notice i'm i'm i've done a lot of aerial flights over different parts of the us and and even in ireland uh they made cows make those little paths where the little pads about this why they need to walk in single file uh down these little paths i see i see no that's uh that's brilliant yeah and you can you go over a small plane you can see that um i've got i've got loads of questions coming in goodness temperature because i can't see the chat no that's it no no we'll let you but your best not to is it's a busy place um i've got um so there's another another question here about enrichment and i think it's important we cover this i know some people who put um balls up for carbs and the like and uh you've already spoken about cow brushes what would you is there anything else you would recommend as positive enrichment for either carbs or cows they like long hay the long stuff and one of the problems we've got right now with some of our beef feedlots is they're chopping the hay up like this like that bad and we're having some very bad liver problems and they're doing it to get feed conversion but we we've also selecting more and more and more for meat so we've had some leg problems we're getting heart uh congestive heart failure and i this is just pushing the biology too hard yes some of the liver problems are out of control now no i see i see no well i think it is a bit of a challenge isn't it it's uh well you see what happens is they're doing that to reduce the amount you know improve the feed ratio yes but you see the same issue has come up in chickens well at what point have you pushed this system too far and and then chickens they've learned they've got to back off a little bit now going back to slow growing chickens and increase your feed 20 percent that's not very good from a sustainability standpoint but with some of these cattle you're getting uh you're really starting to get into some problems i mean if you have an animal that dies a week before slaughter uh he's got zero weight gain absolutely that's not very very efficient and i think what's happened it's bad becoming normal it's just like the lameness creeping up or traffic if you were not you know uh monitoring for speed it it happens slowly it's the same things happen with the bulldog we bred for more and more of a big head smashed in face now they can't walk can't breathe even after they do the surgery they still can't breathe that's bad becoming normal and it creeps up slowly and you don't realize the mess you're kind of getting in and beef cattle have got some issues now that um i 20 years ago would have never dreamed it would be a problem you know when i see an animal welfare issue right now at a meatpacking plant it's something i have to fix at the farm they didn't get lame on the truck don't blame the truckers for this they didn't cause it it has to be corrected at the farm some of its genetics and some of it is how they're fed and growth promotes going overboard with that i've um there's a another question that uh i'll perhaps make my last question i think because i've got a one or two things just to say at the end um the um in the when i watched the film um i think it was it was your film about your life there was a moment in it where your family were using a squeeze crush for cows um is that something that you you feel is a is a definite positive for using with with cattle does it genuinely have a an effect well i think yes it does and uh now a lot of times dairy cows are so tame you don't need to but beef cattle that aren't so tame i first of all keeps them just flinging themselves all around now i've come over to the uk where they've gotten them and then the people were really pleased with it the other thing that that movie showed is it showed i was a visual thinker you see everything i think about the picture see right now i'm seeing some farms that i went to in the uk on a trip i especially for cattle that got any wildness at all that's where the squeeze really works well and you have to make sure that you don't from off balance with some of the cheaper ones just one side squeezes and that can throw a cow off balance and then if you've got really a lot of our animals right now really broad the the angus are really broad we have we have a squeeze crush that can pivot at the bottom and squeeze like you know pivot at the bottom or ones where the sides come in parallel now if we use something like some dairy i would get the ones where it's straight sides that moving in parallel i see i see it's easier for them to walk in and out of that where the ones that are beat at the bottom it's harder for them to walk in and out of that no it was the one thing that struck me about that the the film was the the effect that it was having on those ranch cattle so um well they you know if you've got completely tamed dairy cattle you've got to put a non-slip floor in there because you'll get these little slips like this and they are absolutely getting blue and you'll watch one of the feet and it'll just be going like this i've seen that on single animal scales too and the animal is just completely scared and then you just put one thing in there to stop that little side slip like this they calm right down a lot of your situation you can get the ones where the sides stay straight we use a lot of the v-shaped ones but we get we still get quite a lot of very wild cattle coming in and one issue that we've had and this is not good is we've had some grass people grow a steer up to three years old and never handle it and that's a wild animal and you've got to bring it into market and that's a that's a big mess you know they they need to have people walking out amongst cattle on the pasture get them used to people on the on the pasture then another problem we've had has been we have cattle on western ranches where they only worked on a horse and they're really nice and calm and then when they see the first person on foot they take off the fly stone will go from two meters to 20 meters when they see the person because a person on a horse looks totally different than a person on the ground absolutely i i think it's i know there's so much more that we could talk about um this evening and i i think i'm afraid time has beaten us and and i'm gonna have to to pull some of these questions to to a close um so it's been really interesting temples thank you so much for your time tonight it's been such an amazing insight um and please could i just remind all dairy farmers about the uh the focus group uh that miriam that temple's mentioned miriam tonight miriam parker is going to be delivering uh with us these are 30 people groups it's going to be delivered online and it's the 24th of february 11 30 till 1 30. and those if you're watching this take a picture of this slide if you can those are the details to to sign up if you're a beef farmer you can you can let us know um you ema email in the same way or phone call and we'll uh we'll aim to try and accommodate you where we possibly can if you've got any questions related to today we're keen to to hear those uh we'll we'll try to answer as many as we possibly can after today um but um but we we're really keen for your feedback too uh there's two more webinars in the series the the next two webinars are live only you are gonna miss out they're not being recorded if you don't listen live we've got neil chesterton uh from new zealand from from lame cow in new zealand on the 16th of february that's next week it's exactly the same time slot and europe driessen from cal signals in the netherlands on the 2nd of march um in a moment when when the webinar ends there will be feedback form at the end so please do fill it in and let us know what your thoughts are for this evening and let us know what more you would like to see um thank you temple once again um it's it's been a fantastic insight i've really enjoyed working with you on this and thank you everybody for spending your evening with us thank you so much for having me i really enjoyed uh talking to everybody thank you uh and and goodbye i'll phone you in a moment goodbye you