An excellent blog entry:
Foothill Agrarian: Unwritten Rules: During this past baseball season, I discovered a great podcast - “Unwritten” - featuring former major leaguers Ron Darling and Jimmy Rollins...
Included in this, is this:
Most of us who are (or work with) ranchers have heard that we’re not supposed to ask a rancher how many sheep or cows they own. “That’s like asking you how much money you have in your savings,” we tell the errant inquisitor. This unwritten rule, at least in my case, masks the fact that my livestock inventory is more complicated than just saying I have (at the moment) 62 head of sheep. My actual sheep numbers (as of this moment) include 52 breeding ewes, 7 replacement ewes, and 3 rams. If you’d asked me this question on May 1st, I would have told you I had 84 ewes, even thought at that moment I had 212 sheep (84 ewes, 126 lambs, and 2 rams).
And yet, we all get that question.
I'm practically to the point I'm going to actually start replying with that "how much money do you have in the bank" reply. It's a nosy question, "how many cattle do you have", and like the blogger here notes in his entry, it's a really complicated question. If I have X number of cows in February, I hope to have Xx2 in April, but I don't want to have to explain all of that, and its not anyone's business.
To add to it, I think to a lot of people, "how many cows do you have" is sort of like "how many dogs do you own". Frankly, it's more akin to going into a machine shop and asking, "how many lathes do you have here."
But nobody likes to be rude, so for the most part most ranchers will sort of answer.
2 comments:
I usually answer that "Depending on my mood on any particular day, I either have way too many cattle or I don't have anywhere close to enough cattle".
Most of the time, I keep track similar to the way described above, I know how many bulls, how many cows, how many heifers and how many calves I have, but I don't think in terms of a total headcount.
"Most of the time, I keep track similar to the way described above, I know how many bulls, how many cows, how many heifers and how many calves I have, but I don't think in terms of a total headcount."
Same with me. In order to have a total head count, I have to actually stop and figure it out.
Indeed, for general "where are we at" purposes, I don't even normally include bulls, even though they are there, as they have their special job and while I keep track of them, I keep track of them in regard to what I need to have them cover.
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