"Ummm, excuse me?" A teenage girl and boy stand peeking in the door to the livestock office trailer. I look up from the show paperwork I'm sorting and ask how I can help them. "My pig ate my bill of sale," the girl replies. I muffle my laughter and ask to see it. The boy pipes in that they have a copy of it but they were told we need the original. The paper is mangled and has a large snout shaped chunk taken out of it but all the pertinent details are there. I grab the tape and a sheet of paper and use the new paper as backing. The bill of sale salvaged, the teens head out to take their pigs through the weigh in. I burst out laughing at the thought of what their FFA advisor's face would look like when they told him. "My pig ate my bill of sale..." Wonder if that pig got the taste for paper from a steady diet of homework? Or better yet, who put the pig in charge of the bill of sale?
Every group has "special people." Fair is no different. I actually kind of want a shirt that says "NOT a member of the 4-H Drama Project" But, both sides of the livestock aisle has its share of drama. Oddly enough, the people who create the drama are the ones who are most passionate (or competitive) about their animals, children, or event. In the six years I've been in the office, I've heard a lot of drama. My favorite this year was the rumor being spread about during weigh in that the scale was 70 lbs off. Each animal has a specific weight range required to be shown. If the scale was that far off we would have either a lot of underweight or overweight animals. The idea that the scale was 70 lbs off was laughable.
Each year, I end up trying something new in the Livestock arena. Last year, I did some announcing. This year, I checked tattoos at vet check for the dairy goats. I like goats. I was a part of the dairy goat project when my siblings were showing. I never did tattoos. Never looked at tattoos. But, we needed someone with goat experience to go out and check tattoos. In theory, I knew the tattoos were done in the ears or, in the absence of ears, the tail. I grab a flashlight (for a backlight) and wipes (to clean the area) and head out. Now, my siblings raised Toggenburgs. Lovely mocha colored goats with white markings. And light skin. The first goats through the vet check: Alpines. With DARK ears. Goats are tattooed with dark green ink. Try spotting green ink on black skin... Even with a flashlight for back light, it was like trying to find a green bead in a box of blue beads that someone is shaking in the dark. Plus, every tattoo varies in placement in the ear. Seriously, goats with black ears should be tattooed with black light ink. It would be so much better. Trying to figure out which way was up or down to determine if it was a letter or number was a challenge. I was just looking to see if there was a tattoo much less trying to read it. "What am I looking for?" "A3" "Ok... I sort of think I see something that looks like that" All this without slowing down the line of animals cleared by the vet so they could get out of the hot trailers and into the building. It was a challenge that made me laugh and say "never again!"
My other favorites were the freshly tattooed goat kids. You knew where they had been tattooed by the large amount of green ink in their ears. The ink needed to be wiped off in order to read the tat. Such lovely green ink which sticks to your fingers and gets into your cuticles. I didn't mind the ink on my hands. The green thumb look works for me but I still have a remnant of ink in my cuticles.
On Saturday, I arrived to find a goldfish in a nice little carrying container sitting on my desk. There was a note. The fish and the note had been left outside the door and found by the Livestock Manager. The note read:
D3AR Livestock Office,I can no longer provide 4 my baby gurl.please spoil her rotten.Her name is Jazzy.Thanks I love you,MBR
It took me a day but I found Jazzy a home. In the meantime, the note and the fish became a bit of a local livestock legend. We even thought about auctioning her off to benefit the Ag Boosters. I also sent a picture of the note to a couple of friends thinking they would enjoy the laugh. But I forgot to explain that Jazzy was a fish... :)
