Branding and Mulesing and Shearing, oh my!

What a week! After incessantly pestering all the cowboys to take me along, three of them finally relented, giving me three full days of adventures.
Day 1: Branding. I woke up at 4:30am, and by 5:15, I was waving a big plastic stick and yelling "Yi-hep! Woop woop!" in my deepest, most intimidating voice, herding the 400 cattle from pen to pen. It was kind of scary to be surrounded by enormous, two hundred pound animals, but apparently they can sense fear and will consequently start bullying you. Hence the deep loud voice/bravado.
The calves are shoved, one by one, into a contraption that flips them sideways and pins them so all the their legs are in the air, allowing the cowboys to do what they need to do. It's hard to explain, but I'll upload a video soon. Anyway, once they're rendered helpless, a cowboy steps up with basically a large hole-punch and rips a few pieces out of their ears and shoves a tag in. Another takes a small, sharp blade and quickly cut off the balls, tossing them aside for the dogs, or, in one instance, to land neatly on my sneaker. Then comes the branding, and finally, somebody takes a big blade and slices off the horns (so they don't bruise the other calves, rendering their meat worthless.) Throughout all of this, the calf is snorting and and mooing in pain, and all of the other calves in line are stamping and flipping out, seeing what's in store for them. Finally, with blood dripping from their head and nether-regions, it stumbles around, bamboozled, not knowing anything except that he's less of a man than he was 45 seconds ago. I had no idea all of this was involved, and I almost threw up the first time I saw it. Nevertheless, I branded about 20-30-- it's pretty easy, actually, and I told myself that it probably didn't hurt too much. Then, so I didn't look like a wimp, I tried cutting off the balls...but I could only do one, and then a cowboy named Luke grabbed my hand and finished the job. I also tagged an ear. We had steak sandwiches for lunch, and I very nearly became a vegetarian. Then I remembered that it was 3pm and we'd been working for about 10 hours, so I dug in with renewed carnivoric gusto. Mom has already told me that I sicken and disgust her. "Don't worry," I said. "I'll never do anything like that again." But oops, lo and behold...
Day 2: Mulesing. The process is much simpler and quicker than branding, though no less gruesome. The sheep are shoved into little metal traps on their backs, with their legs bent back to their heads, exposing their tail/ass region. A man comes and snips off their tail, then cuts off the skin around the anus. Blood spurts everywhere. They do this to prevent against the blowfly, which causes maggots to devour the sheep from the inside out-- a very slow, painful death. Yes, I did this too. Yes, it was horrific and I was covered in blood. I only did it once and spent the rest of the day running around, catching runaway sheep, which, although I was essentially delivering them to torture, felt more humane to me.
Day 3: Shearing. Much less horrific, much less to explain. Just like giving it a haircut, except harder to do because I couldn't tell where the skin was. I nicked one and it bled everywhere. Axelle came with me to this one, and and I thought she was going to cry (vegetarian, remember?). I, however, am now an emotionless monster and didn't blink an eye.

Those are the highlights of the past week. The rest is the same old stuff. November 4 was the Melbourne Cup, "the race that stops a nation." Literally. Everything in town was closed except for, of course, the pub. People came out of the woodwork to place hundreds of dollars in bets and spend hundreds of dollars more on alcohol. I placed a $15 dollar bet, just so I could play along, and won $15, even though I don't know anything about horseracing. It's hard to watch some of these people. They probably spend $1000 a week in the pub, betting, drinking, and complaining about their financial woes. Oh well, they seem happy, I guess, so whatever floats your boat.

Finally, huzzah for Obama! I was thrilled to discover that Australia was as interested in the election as I was. However, many of the hillbillies in the pub are alarmingly racist, saying things like, "How could you vote for that n****r? I bet he's assassinated within a month." I would try to explain to them how ignorant they sound, but I was terribly outnumbered. Oh well. Go America!