How to Dehorn a Calf With a Disbudding Iron - Removing Cattle Horns
Dehorning
dehorning is kind of one of those things that aren't a fun farm tour but quite necessary it seems really kind of cruel to burn a calf's horns off you really don't want cop earth which will turn into a full-sized cow with horns particularly not a bull with horns is just an accident waiting to happen and the cow is too but usually cows aren't nearly as pushy or aggressive as bowls and so you really really want to take off their horns of course the thing about cows is he'll be handling them a lot more than you well bulls so really for both of them you don't want a cow with horns one that has horns will tend to push around the others it'll be harder to work with a horse or with the dog and they can be a hazard even to themselves sometimes you can see right here that's her own calf that she was pushing blossom even though she has horns it's very good tempered so her horns haven't ever been a problem for us but it's just best not to have horns on them because of that because even if they don't mean to do anything they can still do some serious harm even by accident so all that to say this little guy we're calling him Samson for now it's going to get his horn he's taking off today .
so we have the iron heating up right now and a little bit we'll catch him and take him over to the barn to do that so this is my dehorning iron and is a Reyn art x50 with the 3/4 inch goat just budding tip on there and it's heating up right now I'm going to use the three quarter inch goat tip for this calf because he's still young enough that I can use a small tip which means that he'll have a smaller burn and thus recover more quickly this is a good reason to do your calves young until a little more about that later but when I wanted to show is this it is plugged into an extension cord now if you absolutely have to use an extension cord that's okay but you really should not plug something of this kind of size into an extension cord at least that's the manufacturer's recommendation so I'm going to just switch this over to the regular power outlet and wait for it to get good and hot now when you heat up your iron make sure that there's nothing handy that it can burn because this is going to heat up to about a thousand or 1,100 degrees and you don't want it to be burning holes and stuff so it's good to have it on concrete or on a metal tray of some sort and preferably put it in a place where nobody's going to step on it no dogs are going to sniff it nothing like that because you don't want anybody to get burned if you can avoid it I don't really like having this here in the walkway but that's the only place.
we could put it right
now and thankfully nobody is really walking around much so I'm gonna go get
together a few other supplies and then we'll get started to dehorn you're going
to need some equipment one of the most important things besides your iron, of
course, is gloves you want some good stout leather.
gloves because otherwise
if you'd bump your finger you will feel it and it will not be good so these are
good leather gloves also a pair of scissors or preferably a pair of clippers
like shaving electric-type Clippers are really good for clipping some of the
loose hair around the calf's horns and you may or may not need this but for
some people, it's very helpful because it makes the horns much more visible and
then lastly nobody has some Allen this is just simply aloe from a leaf off one
of our plants and I peeled off the green part and scraped the inner clear stuff
out normally I mix goldenseal with this but today I actually didn't because I
had other stuff going on and I think I'm about out of goldenseal but I'll
just keep an
eye on so that will be to put on the burn after I'm finished so this is the basic equipment and then you also need a board for testing your so to test your iron just get it on a pressure-treated piece of wood and apply the iron tip super in a dark circle and two to three seconds or less now this time either I'm not applying it evenly or it's not quite hot it's close that circle is really close but I would like it to be just a little bit harder.
now when you actually do it on the tap you're going to probably kind of a rolling motion like this but it should be harder than it is now because that's much better could be the tip wasn't fully engaged so that's how you do yeah for a larger cough he would use only this larger tip it wouldn't have this extension here and that heats up much faster see if I just lay it down there it would light the board on fire in just a few seconds so that gets a lot hotter than the goat tip it's working and he heard the hair you can kind of see the horn you can see the horn right there and it can be helpful to clip the hair away but you can see it better this isn't a necessary step but it can be very helpful especially if you're first starting or shave their head that way you can clearly see where you need to burn and not have so much smoke from brown hair in your eyes alright so now that you've identified exactly where the horn buds are then you can begin burning now even though this may seem cruel to be burning off their mind it ends up being much better for them in the long run because they're much safer without horns and this is the most human method of removing them you do it while they're young like this they recover very quickly and using a hot iron burns through the nerves very quickly so they actually don't feel as much meaning Ferrand has gotten very cool for some reason the switch got turned off blue and I'm running a ring like that we'll just have to wait for that to get good and the hot switch gets turned over sometimes see it has to solder this little switch will get pushing halfway over and that turns it off some people use the caustic paste to the horn but that's actually very cool it doesn't disable the nerves right anyway it'll hold its heat for a little while so you can actually I'm so I get for this now just apply it firmly to the burn but this is why you wear gloves and I'll kind of rotate like that tried to hold his head still with my knee as well and you can kind of press down what you're looking for is a full cover and burn a circle or an accent okay flip them over into the other side look that back in yeah yeah pick it up to Emily this is extremely hot you can black grab the black we should be closing up now look at it don't grab anything else but that black handle near the cord.
actually, I could go ahead now put the outer line to help that burn heal up quickly and cool their head off ah soon as we're done here we'll give him back to his mom and it'd be comforted roll him on his back that's because I don't want to do anymore and that's moving a little slow for a couple of days well a day or so then he should be up and on his feet but it should be on his feet
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