nr said:
Jinglebob said:
You would be amazed how easy it is to find people in this country, nr. After all, there are a lot less of us then there are of you, back there.
You made a good point, JB, besides the one on your head.
About being a brand inspector. Does this mean you went to each ranch and had to look at all the cattle? :shock: :???: How on earth could that work? Pardon my (usual) ignorance.
I was a local inspector. When someone sold an animal in the country,and not thru' a sale barn or auction barn, where there is always a full time brand inspector, they called me and I went and made sure it had the proper brands or bill of sale, before the new owner paid for it.
Mostly when someone sold a horse to a neighbor or when they shipped the calves or yearlings in the fall.
During the big fall runs, when a lot of livestock was being sold thru' the sale barns, sometimes they would have me come and help the full time inspectors. When there are 3000 to 5000 head going thru' a barn and they all have to be inspected in daylight, and the days are gettin' short, sometimes you need quit a few inspectors, to get all the work done.
I, or any other inspector for that matter, would look at every critter that was being sold and make sure they all had the owners legal brand or he had a legal bill of sale, for each animal.
Sometimes you would have to shear the hair off to read the brand. You'd be surprized at how many strays that we found.
Ask Soapweed. I believe he said that the inspectors at a local town found one or two of his.
In most cases, it was a matter of someones critter getting into someone elses pasture and nobody knew it. Very few times was it theft. Tho' that happens too.
But most of those deals, they just load them up and haul them across the river, where there is no inspection. We've tried over the years to get the eastriver to make it part of the brand inspection area, but for some reason, they won't. It causes some friction between eastriver and westriver, here in SD.
Kind of like if you had someone who stole something from you and as long as they got across a certain line, they could keep it and you had no re-course, under the law.
Don't you wish you hadn't asked, now?
:lol: :lol: :lol: