Paul Marchant

When it comes to cattle restraint and capture, I suppose my family is not all that different from a lot of ranching families.

My brother and I always figured the best way to doctor any critter, no matter the ailment, was to rope it. If a yearling had a burr in its tail – rope it. Bad eye, snotty nose, black hide, red hide – rope it.

My dad, on the other hand, tends to always (so it seemed to us) prefer the gentleman farmer approach – run it in the corral and into the chute. So, on average, we always use best management practices, I suppose.

After having lived his entire life – up to that point – in the arid, rural West, my oldest son spent a couple of years in the Washington D.C. area.

He was quite an anomaly in the cities of the East Coast. While some of his roommates and acquaintances were not completely unfamiliar with the West, none of them could quite understand his addiction.

It wasn’t completely his fault. I suppose it was partly a product of the environment to which he was constantly exposed as a lad and partly due to his genetic makeup.

During my growing up years, I wasn’t particularly fond of certain chores. I was even less fond of piano lessons.

My mom had the misguided notion that I possessed some musical talent that lay hidden somewhere in the recesses of my tone-deaf soul and that I would some day regret my apathy toward developing my talents.

My mother and I had some epic battles as she would, ever so gently, (her recollection) attempt to persuade me to walk to the torture chamber cleverly disguised as the piano teacher’s house (my recollection) to my weekly lesson.

We use an old ’75 Ford F-250 pickup with a homemade flatbed to do most of the feeding in the winter.

My first job out of college, oh so many years ago, was to manage a fair-sized cow outfit in northeastern Nevada. For the most part, we were pretty short on good help, and thus relied on the generosity and willingness of good neighbors to see us through the major projects like branding and the big three- or four-day drives.