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| A gentle touch: Low-stress handling tips (Fall 2007) |
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By Steve Werblow
Understanding how your animals see the world helps you lead them where you want them to go - and helps them want to go there, too. A little time spent thinking about what makes a herd animal feel secure can make moving livestock and horses a gentler, safer, and more fulfilling experience.
Gentle handling revolves around every animal's need for personal space.
Most farm animals have an instinctive
need to keep a little distance between themselves
and predators, called a flight zone. If a
creature that could be a threat - whether it's a
mountain lion or a person - enters that flight
zone, the animal or entire herd starts to move.
Flight zones are easy to observe in curious,
cautious animals like cattle or sheep.
"If the cattle are turning and looking at
you, you're outside the flight zone. If they're
moving away from you, you're inside the flight
zone," notes world-renowned Colorado State
University animal handling expert Temple
Grandin. If you rush too far into an animal's
flight zone, she may turn to confront you - a
reaction that is alarming to both you and her.
Gentle pressure.
Troy Michaels uses flight zones to gently herd cattle and sheep on the farm he operates with his wife Holly near Days Creek, Ore. Michaels and his hired man, Leroy Moore, walk quietly towards a
group of cattle, who shoulder past toward an
open gate. As the lead animals enter the pen,
Michaels and Moore step outside of the flight zone, allowing the cattle to exercise their herd
instinct and follow their leaders into the corral.
Michaels grew up herding animals calmly,
with a minimum of hooting and yelling. Then
he attended a workshop led by gentle handling
guru Bud Williams, where he learned
the fine points of applying gentle pressure
by repeatedly walking into the flight zone,
then backing off, nudging the animals to
saunter calmly to their destination.
"When we hire people to help us, we have
to be careful to get people who aren't prone
to yelling and hitting," notes Holly Michaels.
Stress goes right to the bottom line, affecting
meat quality. Michaels compared
meat from a steer that was slaughtered after
a stressful episode with one harvested under
calm circumstances. "It was a totally different
kind of meat," she says.
Stress hormones.
Grandin explains that
stress causes animals to release cortisol, a
hormone that puts the animal's body on high
alert. Research shows that a beef cow worked
roughly releases a higher concentration of
cortisol than a deer caught in a net or shot
with a tranquilizer dart. High levels of cortisol
have been shown to make meat dark, tough
and unpleasant, and they certainly don't make
the animal much fun to work with, either.
Worse, stress for animals is not just
sparked by rough treatment.
Prey animals are tuned to notice anything
out of the ordinary. So a stray piece of trash
flapping on a barbed wire fence, a coat hanging on a rail, the hiss of an air compressor, a
deep shadow, or even a reflection in a puddle
can cause animals to get stressed and balk,
notes Grandin. Watch how your animals move
across your property, and be sure to eliminate
distractions that cause them to stop in fear.
Horses play by similar rules, so respecting
their desire for safe space and familiarity can
help you manage them more safely and effectively,
notes equine behaviorist Mary Ann
Simonds of Vancouver, Wash.
Simonds bases her training on horses'
strong need to feel safe while within a
herd. "Nature has programmed horses
to feel that there is safety in numbers,"
she notes. The result: horses
will seek to build social bonds with
horses, other animals, and people.
Space is important in those dynamics.
Simonds sets herself up as herd leader by
playing space-taking games with horses, rewarding
them for paying attention and giving
her the largest space, which may have food in it.
"Once you have established yourself as
your horses' best friend and leader, they will
most often follow you anywhere, including
into risky-feeling endeavors like climbing up into a horse trailer or across a stream
of water," Simonds points out.
"While the first level of fear may be triggered
by vision in most social mammals, smell
may be more important for feeling safe," she
adds. "Make everything you work with smell
safe. Put their manure into your trailer before
loading and send something that smells like
you and your horse when you travel to new
places so your horse has the smell of home."
Working with animals' instincts instead
of against them removes the top threat to safe
handling. "'Fear,'" notes Grandin, "is the new
four-letter word everyone needs to know."
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