Mornin everyone, hope you are off the a Blessed Friday!! One more story on Tom Chaires. Dehorning and pruning trees Tom Chaires had bought those 500 head of cattle from Herman Beville. We were down there in the summer of ’75 and leased a 294 son from him. We didn’t have the trailer with us so we went back in 2 weeks to pick him up. While we were there the first time I noticed that Tom had one of those brand new dehorning saws made for large horns. The electric ones with a hole that fits over the horn and then when you hit the switch the blade comes out and cuts the horn. I don’t even know if they still make those or not. He had one of those old powder river chutes with the scissor head gate and he said he was tired of working horns in it. We went back 2 weeks later and we rode by the chute, he had a 55 gallon barrel of horns out there, 2 dead cows by the chute and blood everywhere, there wasn’t a female left on the ranch with horns although he had left horns on the bulls. Some of the horns were cut off 4 inches above the base because they were too big to get the saw to the base, but they were dehorned. Them old cows looked rough but, once they healed they looked pretty good. Tom had live oak trees all over his pastures and if you have ever seen them, you know how big and low the limbs are. He had taken a chain saw and cut the limbs out of every live oak in the pastures up to at least 8 ft high. He said he was tired of getting knocked off a horse when catching cows. He had pulled the limbs out in the pasture and piled them, later he burned them all. As I’ve said before, Tom was a really good man who I always enjoyed visiting and he was really thinking straight that time. He told me later he had not been knocked off a horse since. Man do I miss those old days!
Posted on: Fri, 07 Mar 2014 14:37:58 +0000