MOOO

We took a trip out to the vacca plateau next to the little village of Arenal. It's a little south west of San Ignacio very close to Guatemala. We had two different cattle ranches that needed our services. The first was a herd of about 50 cattle that needed to be dewormed (we do a lot of deworming). We injected them with ivermectin and vitamins. It's kind of hard to jab a needle though the skin and muscle of a cow. It's really thick and of course the cows dont like to cooperate. Also, when in the chute, the cows end up piling on top of one another. This makes it especially difficult to get to them. 

lots and lots of cows!

When we arrived at the second cattle ranch, there were no cattle in the pasture. They were down by the river so we got a nice little break waiting for the 'cowboy's' to bring the cattle back.

trying out the lasso

This time there were wayyy more cattle than at the first ranch and some of them needed to be castrated! The coybows weren't very good at handling their cattle so it took forever to herd them into the chute and the cattle kept breaking through the opening. It was very chaotic at times and very inefficient. There was 14 bull calfs that needed to be castrated. When one would enter the chute the cowboys would rope him and pull him out. As I mentioned earlier they weren't real cowboys so the bulls would often escape and come running and bucking all around the corral we were in. Eventually they would manage to wrangle them down and we would get to work. I got to castrate 1.5 bulls, the first one went really well but on the second one I lost one of the testicle and it was bleeding a lot so Dr. Emma had to come help me out.