Cattle-rustling is a significant problem in Mongolia, and branding is ubiquitous but insufficient. So Minja, Martin’s wife, paints her cattle green. It’s chancy moving stolen cattle when they’re green. Anyone who sees you is going to remember.
She paints the left horn, and the right flank. Cattle don’t really like being painted, and there’s no squeeze chute. But one horn can be used as a convenient handle to keep the animal from running away on you while you're painting the other one. The cattle were penned up in the courtyard, and they were pretty riled up by the time our job was half finished. They’d sort of begun stampeding with nowhere to go when somebody let the horses out. With the horses galloping around, the courtyard was a bit like a meat grinder. Cattle were getting difficult to catch, and it was the rambunctious ones that were left over. We needed help, so the nineteen-year-old boys were released from the wood-shop.
Teenage farmhands do not approach cattle wrassling in a calm or controlled manner. Imagine a courtyard full of stampeding horses and cattle, with nineteen-year old boys flying through the air and over water troughs, while others waterski from the ends of tails and Dayle and I frantically run around with green paint-brushes.
At any rate, the job got done.
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| A picture from before things got wild and the camera was put safely away. |
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