Inquiring, clueless American minds want to know: Australian cattle ranching apparently developed without the strategy of roping cattle. And that’s a huge part of the way American ranchers did it. So how did/do the ranchers down under do the stuff American ranchers do to their cattle while they are way out there grazing?
Thanks for the clue!
Dally roping (tying the animal to the saddle horn after lassoing it) is not universal, fact it’s kind of a stereotype. In Spain, the tradition is to use pics, long poles, sometimes pointed, to herd, funneling the animals into smaller enclosures, chutes and eventually stocks. Mexican Vaqueros use a shorter, leather braided Reata and their saddles have short, fat “dinner plate” horns since they don’t dally/wrap the Reata around it. The Argentinian Gouchos traditionally used the Bolo to entangle the rear legs of the intended critter and bring it down. And there are various ways of downing one without ropes…variations of steer wrestling vary by culture.
These methods developed based on the environment they were working in and what they had easily available to make the job as efficient as possible. Also depends on what kind of cattle you are working with. Dally roping is great with younger/smaller animals. Doubt you want to tie a 900+ adult to your saddle horn. Team roping handles the bigger ones but requires 2 riders plus somebody in the ground to doctor it. Not to mention the complication of horns if they aren’t one if the stubbier horn types or dehorned.
Im sure today the lines are far more blurred between these traditions. Ranchers and handlers everywhere have seen what their counterparts do, probably tried it, borrowed a little if it made sense. I’m sure the Aussies brought their own traditions with them, adapted as needed and used what worked best with what they had to work with to invent some new ways to quickly and efficiently handle cattle as all before them have.
I imagine most ranches anywhere today rely on running them through corrals and chutes rather then treating them one by one in a larger area as was necessary back in the day when fencing material was scarce and branding, castrating, doctoring in larger areas the rule.
We have a cattle crush. We herd the cattle into the yards. The crush holds the beast individually. We can put rings on calves, biddizzor, brand, spray, needle and tend to getting rid of horns without a horse in sight.
If you need the beast to not move you can use a stockstil which uses electricity to paralyse a beast temporarily.
I use a quad for mustering. Or you feed them in the yard and shut the gate.
In the outback they herd using motorbikes and helicopters.
I have heard the cattle in the outback are totally wild. To get them through a gate you stand in front of it. They charge you. You jump out of the way and they are through the gate before they know it.
No I have no desire to try that!
Look up some online videos of ‘camp drafting’
Yes, we do that here too.
We had once a neighbor’s charolais bull get in and we drove him to the gate, but he would not go thru.
I stood in the gate, he charged, I stepped aside and before he could stop and turn around, I had the gate closed and was hiding.
Not for the faint of heart that.
When we check with 4 wheelers, if one needs catching, we either drive it somewhere, bring a horse or if we think we can, knock it for a roll bumping it with the 4 wheeler and get on it and tie it down before it gets up.
Any more, we have guns that will inject long acting medication, if we find a sick animal, so that makes it much easier to treat them without needing to handle them.
Since ranch horses are getting so popular, there is a good market for them as recreational mounts, many are back to prowling pastures and doctoring horseback, work that makes for good horses.
Is the crush how you did it in the old days? How did you hold the animal still before the days of electricity? Before the days of quads, bikes, and helicopters, when you mustered the cattle on horseback, how did you secure each individual animal?
I missed the steps between herding the cattle into the yards and getting each individual animal into the crush. Did you drive smaller and smaller numbers of cattle into smaller and smaller enclosures? Or did you cut one animal at a time out of the herd and drive that animal into the crush?
I’ve seen movies of the men on horseback with long whips but I’ve never seen a scene where they did the equivalent of rope, dismount and tie down, and brand, etc. Did you do something like bulldogging?
Of course I mean the generic “you” not you personally! 
Australian Stock Horses were used and the Australian Stock Saddle has knee pads and no horns.
As well as cutting horses look up camp drafting.
You draft them into a yard. They used to make yards out of fallen trees. Nowadays they have temporary yards. From there you push them up to another yard. From there you can push, with people outside and safe, into the race. The race leads to the crush. You have sliding gates which you push closed behind them so they keep going forward. The cattle can not turn around as it is too narrow. When they go in the crush the gate is shut. The front is opened and you close it on the shoulders. You pull a lever and one comes down above the neck and one comes up below the neck.
There is akso a calf cradle. We don’t have one of those. The calf goes in and you lie it sideways for whatever you want to do.
I have often wondered how much roping was romanticized and how much cattle work was done instead by driving into either natural or manmade enclosures.
I wonder when the first cattle chute was used and then when the squeeze chute (I assume that is what your Aussie Crushes are) became commonplace.
Stockyard pictures from the late 1800’s show pens and chutes.
I don’t know in Australia, but have seen some old pictures there with cowboys roping, so there is some of it.
Here, screwworms demanded during the turn and first half of 1900’s that everyone spent all summer “doctoring for screwworms” and that meant roping all day long, no time to take cattle anywhere and get as many checked and doctored as was necessary in a day, roping was much, much faster.
Newborn calves would get them in the umbilical cord region, any cut meant an infection and when your pastures are measured by the section, a section here is 640 acres and you run 20-25 cows to the section, well, there is no time to, every day, round up and pen all, separate any infected ones to run thru a chute.
Under those conditions, it was way faster to get to the infected ones at the end of a rope and less stress on all, to treat a few.
Different in the East, where it rains much, you stock many more to the acre, pastures are much smaller and so cattle are easier to check, drive to pens and treat thru a chute.
Today we have portable corrals, but they are very costly, tend to start at $10,000.- and you would need several of those, for all different pastures.
They are not easy to haul and set up and pull in again, not something you want to do every day.
Even today, pasture roping has it’s place and is still common in the SW.
I once visited a historical exhibit in Australia in the outback. They had the water tanks fenced off and the cattle entered through a one-way gate into the fenced area to drink and had to exit through a chute. When they wanted to work cattle or catch one for doctoring, they would close the exit gate into the chute so the cattle would be trapped inside the fence. Then they would run them out of the pen through a different chute and into a head catch.
Back in the Dark Ages in my childhood, I remember seeing head catches made of wood. And just to show, once again, that you can find anything on the internet. here you are:
There is a fairly interesting series called Keeping up with the Joneses following a ranching family in Australia. Large scale moving of cattle is by helicopter and truck; when they are in the pens, on horse and foot. The cattle are herded into chutes and doctored and tagged, etc. in the crush.
They had truck mounted mobile catch pens for catching individual cattle in the bush. It also showed some of the camp drafting competitions, too. It reminds me quite a bit of American working cow horse competition.
Thank you all for the education!
My one remaining question is about the size/distance of pastures. Bluey touched on that-- the sheer size of pastures and the need for roping as a quick way to doctor cattle. I assume the ranges in other places are equally large. Is that wrong? My point is that I can’t imagine wanting to make a herd of beef cattle walk a long way just to get some medical attention. I assumed everyone growing beef had the same basic problem that made roping necessary: They need huge expanses of grass to grow them cheaply, but then need to get out there into the middle of their pasture, too.
Well, with mechanization, there is your answer.
Until there were vehicles that could get out there, fast and in all kinds of weather, the horse was the best, relatively fast way to cover distances, to get to the far off cattle.
Many here any more use 4 wheelers.
It is much quicker than a horse.
Or combine both, haul a horse to the far off places where the cattle are, that used to be inaccessible but by horseback before.
Then complement that with using the horse to rope and treat, maybe pull into a trailer to bring home for attention.
Or just use the Cap-chur guns and shoot some medication in them where appropriate, if you don’t need to be hands on to treat whatever is wrong with one.
Watch the man from Snowy River. They muster them from the top of the Snowy Mountains and the movie is set before cars.
There is also The Man From Snowy River II.
They were inspired from the poem by Banjo Patterson also called The Man From Snowy River.
You are in for a treat if you have not read the poem or seen the movies.
It is an Australian legend and I believe the poem was written back then.
AFAIK Cattle are no longer allowed on the Snowy Mountains because of greenies. So now the fuel builds and they have super fires that destroy so much more than bush fires did in the past.
The outback in Australia is huge. It would cover a few States in America.
Watch this as it has some historical footage as well as modern experts talking and doing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfNyY-eqgOI
Look at old photographs and paintings (e.g., Erwin Smith, Frederic Remington). Note the ropes. Western (American) saddles had horns, and double rigging or center-fire rigging to hold them in place when the rope ran taut between the horn and the cow. Not much romance in hard, dirty, dangerous work!
Good article here: http://www.western-saddle-guide.com/…e-history.html
This is why there was so many cattle lost in Nebraska and the Dakota’s during that winter storm that hit after a wet spell. The spaces are large.
I can raise 1 cow calf pair per two acres- actually probably closer to 1.5 acres.
Ask Bluey that same question.
I still think roping was one of many tools used in the old west but not the sole tool. And as Bluey pointed out, dependent upon what the reason was for working cattle.
Remington didn’t romanticise the west at all. Sarcasm btw
I can introduce you to people who call themselves cattleman who rope something when it is not needed just because they can.
I am not anti roping, or anti rodeo at all. I just can’t stand people who call themselves stockmen and don’t work cattle smart.
We are in semi-desert country, on the edge of desert and our county is rated at 25 acres per cow/calf, but the least acres anyone stocks is 30.
From 100 miles and on West of us they do good to run one pair to 100 acres.
Even with being careful not to overgraze, we had great rains in the 1980’s, then a drought started in 1991 and by July 1998 we let the last of our cattle here go and in 2003 we only had 3 1/2" of rain all year.
For those years we didn’t even have one head here, there was nothing to eat, not because of overgrazing, remember, we didn’t have any cattle, but just because it didn’t rain those years, so very little grew and wildlife ate that to survive.
After that it rained more or less, some years more, others less, but we have not had even one year coming back close to that 30 acres per pair.
Because it takes so much land, well, the animals, even rotating, are very scattered.
That means not so easy to get to or bring them in some times.
If it is something that can be fixed catching them just one time, like something stuck in their mouth, or around a foot, roping right there makes more sense.
Or finding a blind pink eye afflicted calf, you have to catch it, hard to drive it very far when it can’t see, then roping helps to get it in a trailer.
We did build a little portable makeshift chute from panels that fit in the trailer, that we could wire to a fence and drive a sick calf in there to treat it, but again, it was at times quicker to just rope one right there.
Pasture roping is easy on smaller stock, you ease around and before they know it, you swing and have them caught, don’t even need to run them at all.
Then you flip the rope over them, walk the horse half around and back it and the rope will tighten around the legs, they fall down and if you are fast to them, you can hold them down and tie them up before they get up.
A calf will not have even taken a step in all that, is minimally stressful and most times it doesn’t even disturbs others laying around there.
If you miss, then you have to chase one down and apologize to your horse, that will be rolling his eyes at you while complaining under it’s breath that, really, he was just standing there, how could you miss?
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