A nose numbing odor and a painful whirring sound filled the cattle barn at Oak View Animal Hospital on Friday evening as a few show cattle got what amounts to a pedicure.
The massive hands of Ben Sorrell deftly maneuver the grinder, removing just enough hoof until he’s satisfied that the animal has an even weight distribution.
“I want them to walk better,” Sorrell said as he operated the hydraulic cattle chute that held the cow nearly on her side, feet sticking out and tied into slings. Asked about the art, and the science, of trimming hooves, he chuckled, then said, “If I tell you, then you’ll run off and do it.”
The joke aside, he launched into a soft rant about the different ways people trim hooves.
Injecting a numbing agent into the space between the toes of the cow’s left rear foot - yes, cows do indeed have toes - he prepared to remove a large corn growing there. And yes, cows get corns. He used a scalpel to cut away the growth, then used a hot iron to cauterize the wound. Gauze and a wrap went on the hoof.
The work done on that cow, Sorrell untied her feet, then flipped a couple of levers on the side of his truck and the chute righted itself.
He then lowered the chute until the cow stood on her own. He unhooked two large rubber straps, one on each side of her belly, and opened the gate. The cow walked into a nearby holding pen as a giant bull walked out.
“Over there,” owner Jerry Johnson said to the 2,300-pound purebred Santa Gertrudis show bull.
The bull, took the direction and moved into another pen. The bull slowly turned about and, seeing the open chute, dutifully walked into it. Without a sound or twitch, he stood there as the straps were attached and he was lifted off the ground and turned onto his side.
“Looks pretty good,” Sorrell said, “but he does have some cracks.” Using a curved knife, the professional hoof trimmer who graduated from Pea Ridge High School in 1983 sliced off pieces of hoof, exposing a channel where the rock had gone through the hoof. “That stays there, it’s going to hold mud and it’ll start to rot and he’ll have problems walking.”
Sorrell noted that dairy herds and show cattle usually get far better hoof care than those in cow-calf operations.
“Lots of guys,” Johnson said, “just let them keep on (walking on poor feet). But when you keep show animals, you keep them in better shape.”
Sorrell now calls Galena, Mo., home. His father, Leon, still lives in Pea Ridge.
“I left in ’85 to go to Galena to work at a dairy farm there,” Sorrell said. “I started Sorrell Hoof Trimming in 1991.” He said the first few years were tough, but as word of his work spread business improved. He now travels the four-state area, on the road for weeks at a time.
It’ll take him two weeks to trim the 2,800 hooves on a 700-head dairy farm near St.
Louis.
It was less than an hour to trim the hooves on Johnson’s two cows and single bull.
It would have been much faster without all the talk.
Finishing the job of slicing and grinding on the bull’s feet, Sorrell righted the animal, then released him from the restraint. The bull knew what to do. He walked out of the chute and stood there until Johnson told him to load in the trailer, the obvious sign that Johnson has spent a lot of time loading and unloading these animals.
Sorrell said that dairy farmers, far more than even show-cattle farmers, spend so much time with the animals that working with them is easy.
What’s hard, he said, is the economy.
“Fuel prices are hurting me, just like feed prices are hurting farmers,” Sorrell said. “I’d charge more, but that’s going to hurt the farmers even more - so I’m not going to raise prices until the economy gets better. I just can’t do that to these people.”
News, Pages 1 on 05/08/2013