As designers, we’re always discussing brands and branding issues. I’ve mentioned before that that I grew up on a cattle and sheep ranch in south-central Utah. Our family’s brand — the kind burned into cattle’s hides and painted on sheep’s wool — is a Quarter-Circle Seven. We’ve used it since, probably, the 1850s.
As a vegetarian who couldn’t stand the thought of burning cattle with a red-hot iron or castrating lambs with a knife and my teeth, I didn’t fit into a cowboy family all that well, but it’s is still a huge part of who I am. I thought it might be interesting to share the actual brand I grew up with and that got me thinking about all this kind of thing when I was just a kid.
I just wrote a more detailed description, but it’s probably not suitable for here, so I deleted it. Most ranchers use a special tool, but my dad did it like his dad, using his teeth. The whole process is called docking and also involves cutting off tails, notching the ears for ID purposes and vaccinating the lambs — all without anesthesia.
Docking is done about this time of the year, which is what got me thinking about it. Several hundred lambs can be docked in a day using this process. By the end of the day, everyone is covered with crusted-over blood. The lambs mope around for a couple of days, but then they’re back to their regular selves minus a few pieces. I hated docking days. The farm cats ate well for a few days, though.
Here’s a PBS video I found that’s somewhat sanitized and missing the gore:
Thanks for your thoughts, Sundar, but the link you added appears to be more of a promotional link than something relevant to what your post is actually about. Excuse me if I’m wrong, but purely promotional links aren’t allowed (forum rules), so I needed to remove it. Sorry.
I’ll take your word for it with the thoughts of what your words put in my head 