Cattleman’s rope trick in Co Wexford style
Haltering a cow or young animal is easier with a length of plain rope. The rope trick, demonstrated to me by a Co Wexford farmer when I was on one of my trips to Ireland, combining evening talks with farm visits, is something once learned, never forgotten.
As a young farmer, Jim Forriistal was shown the technique by a vet who was nearing retirement, and Jim has used it all his life.
The vet was savvy, as it is the farmer’s task to secure his animal and present it for inspection, diagnosis and treatment, and if the job of roping is done quickly, the vet can be quickly down the road to the next customer.
A 12-foot length of wagon rope is all that’s needed.
Jim has rot-proof halters scattered around the cattle buildings. Readers who say they can easily afford to buy a proper halter from the stores will be missing the point, because the rope trick makes it far easier to get a halter on an animal in a pen.
The difference is that this method has the handler standing to the side, rather than at the front, and the first part of the process is putting a simple loop around the neck, which gives instant control.
The second part is to slip a large loop around the animal’s nose, which is done from the side, and then the slack end is pulled tight.
The warning is: do not leave an animal tied-up unsupervised, because there is nothing to stop our trick rope tightening, unlike the knot you add to the rope on a standard halter.
Roping cattle in a pen or a raceway is a job done on a very regular basis by all who look after them.
They may need treatment, or need moving to another pen or building, or have their tags checked.
You might have a cow in the middle of calving that needs to be secured, so you can help her. Doing it with the standard halter can become a frustrating rodeo — I know from bitter experience — and the more wound up the animal becomes, the harder it is to get the halter on.
Jim moved a couple of young Limousin bulls into a raceway. With the standard halter, I would have had to either lean far out over the rails, or get into the race with the bull. With Jim’s rope, the job was done quite easily from the side, and two bulls were roped and secured before they knew what was going on.
Farming may have changed out of all recognition in the past half century, but some techniques remain as useful now as when they were passed on from the previous generation.
The more philosophical question is whether we will find livestock farming returning to some of the older, herbal remedies, used 50 and more years ago, as antibiotics and other powerful drugs becomes increasingly controlled by legislation.
That would result in a whole new learning curve for cattlemen and others — and the return of some wonderful odours in the medicine cabinet.
