July 23, 2007
When I read a recent article about Paul Newman starting a camp for ill children at Carnation Farm — a beautiful refuge east of Seattle — I was reminded of the tours that I led there back in the mid-80s. I worked at Herff Jones Diploma Manufacturing in a Seattle suburb, and our parent company at the time was Carnation. When they needed tour guides for large groups, they would call upon managers from our division to provide them.
It was still a working farm then, and the business of reproduction was fascinating. The tour leaders were taken up to "Bull Hill" where semen was extracted, and it was explained to us that the prize bulls there were too large for safely mounting females in estrus, so some juvenile bulls were given an operation where their reproductive organs were moved to the sides of their bodies. This way they would still have their sex drive intact, but they wouldn't be able to impregnate the females, who — when shown to be in heat — would be artificially inseminated with the prize semen from the big boys. They called these smaller bulls "Sidewinders."
I'm serious.
But how could they tell which females were in estrus? If they put the Sidewinders in the pasture or in the barn with the females, how would they know which ones had been involved in a dry mount unless they watched them 24/7? The solution was amazingly low-tech: they adhered a red marking pen to the chins of the Sidewinders so that when they mounted a ready female, there would be a mark on the heifer's back.
Most of the tour guides avoided this bit of info like the plague and rushed their groups through that pen to the more genial milking barn, but I found it fascinating and always shared it. At one of the tours I led, a little gray-haired lady listened intently and then looked around the barn at all the wobbly red slashes and said, "Oh dear. There are certainly no secrets here, are there?"
Comments
golfergirl (anonymous) says...
Even at my advance age, I have never heard the word "estrus" before. I must really be a city slikcer. You learn something new every day. Funny story! : )
July 23, 2007 at 8:04 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
pdetmer (pdetmer) says...
OK. I could have said "heat". I was just trying for something a tad loftier ...
Pat
July 23, 2007 at 11:57 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
rockandrollgrandma (rockandrollgrandma) says...
That is so funny. You are a crack-up.
July 23, 2007 at 12:19 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
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