Indispensable tool of the trade

An apple just tastes better if eaten with a pocket knife one slice at a time, and I doubt if any farmer or rancher ever washes his pocket knife under a faucet. To this day cowboys on the ranches still use pocket knives sharpened as a razor to castrate bull calves and ear-notch ownership in left or right ears. Sometimes the hand will sit in the shade, against a fence and cut a chew off his Tinsley or Red Man plug. Shucks, there’s no dirt on that blade, it never touches the ground. When I grew up in the late 1930s and ‘40s every schoolboy carried a pocket knife to play mumble-peg during recess or lunch time. Now they get thrown out of school if found with even a tiny fingernail knife in a pocket. I truly understand the ruling by school administrators, but isn’t it sad. No tool is more important than a knife in agriculture. It is used to scrape battery terminals, cut binder twine and rope, or in an emergency puncture a bloated cow to let off the frothy gas. Before man invented the wheel he developed a stone knife with a point and a form of scraping blade...read more