Playing the handyman is a full-on task
IT certainly isn’t limited to farming – but there are a lot of jobs out there where two hands are never enough to get some work done quickly and efficiently.
Take for instance the fairly routine task of applying ear tags to lambs before they go off to market. Every sheep has to have a special tag with an electronic thingymajig in it which means it can be recognised at markets around the country.
From the sheep’s point of view I guess it’s a bit like having your ear pierced – a bit nippy, but if it’s done fast enough it doesn’t sting for long. Unlike the local piercing clinic, though, dozens have to be done at a time. This involves wading through pens of sheep, persuading them to hold their heads up and keep their ears still, and carefully timing the squeeze of the tagging pliers. Sounds simple. But once you’ve finished one sheep you’ve got to get the next one done as you work your way up the sheep race – so you have to carry plenty of tags with you. And since you need at least one hand to persuade the sheep to hold its head up and the other to work the pliers, I find that I always end up holding a strip of the tags in my mouth so I can load up for the next sheep straight away. This is fine until I inevitably drop the tags and they then get kicked about a bit by the sheep who don’t tend to have the cleanest of feet. While a quick dicht can get rid of the worst of what inevitably ends up coating the tags, it would be a much more pleasant if there was the option of keeping them in a third hand.
It’s not the only job which requires an extra means of holding equipment.
Changing the needles on a dosing gun when we’re vaccinating animals or treating them for worms also requires more hands than we possess, for if you put one of the needles down, it inevitably gets lost.
One day, while injecting some cattle for liver fluke with a medicine that can only be described as “YELLOW!”, I had been happily using the same tried-and-tested approach to make sure I didn’t lose the needles as I changed them, when some salesman appeared.
After chatting with them I got back to the job – but was left with a feeling that they had been giving me slightly funny looks.
It wasn’t until I got in at night that I realised the dye had managed to apply itself all round my mouth – giving me a