Recently my husband went on an overnight trip with our 17-year-old and some of the other teenage boys in our church to southern Nevada to have a real Western experience: castrating bull calves.
They drove down (5 hours one way) on Friday night and camped on the ranch near the 81 calves who had been separated from their mothers that afternoon. The mothers and the calves bellowed and complained all night long, which did not make for a good night's rest!
In the morning, the calves were herded into a fenced yard. The real cowboys would single out a calf, lasso him by the back legs and drag him out to the middle. One of the boys would run out and tackle him and hold him while he got branded, got his ear clipped, got his shots, and then got castrated by the rancher. There was a lot of dust and somewhere along the way the calf emptied the contents of his intestines. Poor calf.
Later, the boys got to try the raw "Rocky Mountain oysters" as they are euphemistically called! They got dared to swallow them, so four of them did it for $20 each. My son said his stomach really hurt late that night but after that he was fine.
All in all, a messy but memorable experience.
They drove down (5 hours one way) on Friday night and camped on the ranch near the 81 calves who had been separated from their mothers that afternoon. The mothers and the calves bellowed and complained all night long, which did not make for a good night's rest!
In the morning, the calves were herded into a fenced yard. The real cowboys would single out a calf, lasso him by the back legs and drag him out to the middle. One of the boys would run out and tackle him and hold him while he got branded, got his ear clipped, got his shots, and then got castrated by the rancher. There was a lot of dust and somewhere along the way the calf emptied the contents of his intestines. Poor calf.
Later, the boys got to try the raw "Rocky Mountain oysters" as they are euphemistically called! They got dared to swallow them, so four of them did it for $20 each. My son said his stomach really hurt late that night but after that he was fine.
All in all, a messy but memorable experience.
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