In the middle of the middlemen
The sale is bigger than I expected, 55 pens of bullocks with a few stragglers coming in, roughly 400 cattle. It’s a lively trade. There’s a good attendance of buyers, sellers, lookers-on and knots of professional cattle dealers and factory agents dotted around the ring.
Cattle dealers are the middlemen of the live cattle trade, buying at one sale, or off the land somewhere, and then ‘turning’ those same animals at another sale, in another location. I have often thought that cattle dealers and Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary have a lot in common. Both move goods from one place to another.
