Lee Pitts: Tuckered Out

 Do your suffer from iron-poor blood? Do you start your whiskey-drinking with your morning coffee? Are you spurring your horse more and using a hot shot on your cattle instead of a paddle? In other words, are you taking out your depression on your livestock? Does nothing excite you any more, like a romantic evening with your wife or a fishing or hunting trip to the High Sierras? Do you often consider moving into town where you could pamper your better-half with an automatic dishwasher, indoor plumbing and a stove you don’t have to light with a match every time you want to use it? If so, then you could be suffering from “ranch burn out”.

If you think you’re suffering burn out symptoms take my simple Burn Out Test and if you find yourself answering “yes” more than “no”, you probably have this much-dreaded and incurable malady.

1) When you’re sitting on the can and catching up on your reading do you reach for the AARP Magazine more often than your favorite livestock weekly or monthly cow magazine?

2) Instead of jumping out of bed at two in the morning to check the heifers and to look at any new calves that are the result of your all new powerful bull battery, do you tell your wife it’s her turn and roll over because you need your beauty sleep? Or even worse, do you just say to heck with it and let Mother Nature cull any hard calvers?

3) Instead of weaning your calves 60 days before selling them as everyone in the industry says you should, do you load them up right off the cow and send them to the auction market and let them put up with all the balling and any sickness?

4) Do you and your wife brand your calves on a table so you don’t have to feed half the county a free meal and then spend two weeks fixing all the damage your friends, neighbors and an assortment of hangers-on created?

5) Instead of cementing in some new railroad ties and building a new loading chute and lead-up alley do you just brace up the old posts because you calculate that you’ll be called to “the great roundup in the sky” before the termites completely destroy your working facilities?

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