ball bustin’

There are some farm activities that are not any fun at all. One of them is butchering chickens, and another of them is castrating young bulls. NBC will be butchered in fall 2011. His name is short for “New Bull Calf”. We chose this imaginative moniker because we didn’t want to get attached to him. Yeah right. Now NBC stands for “No Balls Calf”, though. If young bulls aren’t castrated the manly hormones degrade the quality of the meat. So the vet came out and used the device above to put a rubber band around NBC’s man stuff. It does just want you think it does, and they will drop off after about 2 weeks. Apparently it hurts moderately for about an hour  and then goes numb, so NBC won’t be spending too much time worrying about it, we hope, but how do we know. Sometimes farm life is a bummer. Especially if you’re a bull calf.