43. How A Big Truck Cattle Trailer Works

sally sally where you going don't you want to say hi all right whatever okay guys so who wants a brief and elementary explanation of how a cow trailer works well hang tight i'm gonna show you okay so just briefly before we get started this trailer has two compartments right there four compartments in this middle section and two compartments in the back usu most the time you load these four as just as two unless you have cuts you need to keep separate or most time that's how i load it anyways so all right first things first gotta roll up the back door then you tie it off right here and luckily this is one of the bigger ropes so you can just do like this and it'll it'll catch on itself like so that's all there is to that and then the first compartment that we need to load way up there at the front so i'll hop up there real quick after i get my gloves on i'll show you all that here in just a second okay so ordinarily you're backed up to a shoot right here which is like a sally did you get another sticker or you just play him you never can tell with her so ordinarily you'd have a shoot right here you got a sticker don't you come here let me get your sticker let me get your sticker let me get your sticker let me get your sticker come on come on let me get your sticker yep she's playing now she's walking on it oh gosh i'm naughty that dog okay back in we go sally now you're walking on your you you butt head okay so ordinarily you'll be backed up to a shoot which is like a little ramp that lets the cattle walk on so this thing right here against the wall some people i guess call it a hazer gate it essentially folds out and inverts from the position it's in right now to create a little hallway right here to let cattle up to the top deck so what you do pull that pin that's probably kind of loud and then here and then it's coming out of the wall like that and then you got to get the hinge swung the opposite way and then you come right here and uh you set it on this hole okay then take the correct pin and put it in there because if you don't if you put this around and put this pin in there you're gonna be in a world of trouble if you can't get this gate latched okay so now we pull the ramp out which is right here and that'll create like a little walkway for him to uh go up come off the chute there and go up into the top deck okay now the cows can walk up here okay and they walk up front here right where the camera's at i'm going to show you how to load both noses there's two compartments up here in the nose so pull this pin out then pull the spring latch out okay now this area right here is going to go down and create a ramp into the bottom of the trailer this is going to come up against the ceiling and it's all connected by a series of hinges and such over there okay so now they can go in in the bottom nose down there so see where this uh gate is right there i'll show y'all where i where i hide when we're loading these cattle so this is me when we're loading them they walk up between my legs i count them on after the last one goes by me i walk along like this because in case they want they turn around i don't want to be in their way a lot of people are braver than me but something that weighs 7 800 pounds i can run 40 miles an hour i'm not taking any chances so i'll i slide along this wall here and then i just step down right here and while i'm keeping an eye on the cattle and trying to make my body as wide as possible because if i step up this way they might want to run past me because if you press on them too far they're gonna they're gonna look they want away from you generally pull that pin and then i close this gate on them right here okay so right here is a slam latch and it just works off gravity and those two little these two little washers here just gravity holds them downwards and i gotta lift up on this one to kick the gate back open so kick the gate back open like such then i drop this pin back in there that way if they do want to run out on me and i gotta tuck tail and run the gate stops on that pym they can't get me okay so in this circumstance since these imaginary cattle and it's my imagination these are the most docile critters on the planet but i still close the gate on them anyways okay so they're all down there in the nose in the uh bottom nose just minding their p's and q's so we grab up here and just shut that drop the pin now the bottom nose is loaded okay now this right here is uh only a ramp which i don't like that i like the door kind same thing pull the pin pull the spring latch set it on the ground okay now this little hatch right here what that's there for is it creates an opening right here and uh makes more daylight so these cattle that we put in the bottom nose can see where they're going because there's two kinds of trailers that you can deck out the top there's a kind with a with a rail which is what this is which is a solid floor that moves up and down with a winch and there's a kind with deck boards and those are just just like it sounds like it's just slats that you put in place well whenever you put those flats in place it comes all the way to here all the way back out to the wall and they can't see down in there as good and so they'll they're a little hesitant about wanting to go in but with a fat rail it makes some more daylight down there and it helps them go in or with the calf deck this is a calf deck not a fat reel i'll explain a fat rail in a minute okay so set that right there for them now they've got a whole entire floor got to swing our gate back the other way okay gate is swung same deal i'm hiding up there cattle come between my legs i'll slide along the this gate here and uh or i can walk along this side of the jail but ordinarily just take me two steps slide along right there step down at the last minute hop in same deal now we're putting them in the top nose so close this gate on them it's almost like they've done this before everything's hunky-dory and then this part right here is dangerous because they can they can reach and kick you so what i like to do is with my body away from it though if they do kick it it goes to the ground and doesn't crack me in the noggin okay because there's there's been a lot of people standing in front of their gates and uh they get they get hurt pretty bad so close it with your body out of the way it's closed drop your pin there we go now the cows are loaded up in the two front noses now the next part is uh put cows in the gel here okay so this part is a whole lot easier if you have help because you have to turn them around well we don't need the rope for demonstration purposes okay so ordinarily your help would run them up in here you'd have your your gate closed right there and you'd be up on the other side of the gate in the front of the trailer so he had run three or four of them in here and then he had closed this gate on him right here lock you in there with them okay so remember how we use the cut gate on the front nose well now we're going to do the opposite put them in the back so same deal i want the pin drop so they can't get they can't get through to me if something goes wrong and then they're facing this direction towards me so what i've got to get them to do is i've got to get them to turn around and simultaneously not stirring them up too much i see a bunch of people that are big time cowboys like to hoop and holler and all this and that i'm not one of those people slowest smooth smooth as fast and i don't have to ride a helicopter out of the pasture all right so get them turned around and then they'll hop up in there best cows in the whole world we're not having to fight anybody this is great this is awesome i can't believe how easy this is going and then there you go they're closed now those cattle are in there okay so ordinarily if we're hauling a load of uh feeders which is what i hauled yesterday this whole compartment since i don't need cuts i just wouldn't close the gate on them i just run 20 uh however many in here yesterday's case it was 28 so so now same deal but this time i'm not getting in the i'm not getting in the box with them okay so i run right here plant my feet on that little man rail over there walk on back holler tell them i'm ready la de da da count on 28 head blah blah blah everything's good drop out over here ordinarily i have a free hand in all this and my phone ain't ringing okay so the cows are up there in the top then we just pull this little spring latch and the gate didn't close they kicked it back in my face i'm going to the hospital all right close the gate now with your body weight your entire length of your body on the gate not your hand not your head the entire length of your body drop that pin now the cows are loaded up there all right dude i'm not answering your phone call it's a spam risk i'll answer numbers i don't know anyways okay so now sally you gonna help me load cows or what no sally you're the worst cow dog ever just kidding you're the best okay so now we got to get them set up to go down in the bottom so pretty much what we have to do is uh find a better place for the gopro than that and that's for sure okay gotta put this ramp up put this back against the wall and open up the belly for him and then there's one more thing if you're not decking out your nose so now i got the ramp out of the way got that out of the way now they're going to run them down into the belly okay same thing just a pin and a spring latch like on all the other ones and this little gate opens um and this right here is just a hatch just gravity holds it down pretty much and cal stepping on it and then now same thing i'm hiding up here count them in blah blah blah they're all in none of them are trying to come out on me this is if i have help if not i'd be getting out of the trailer every time but if i had help i'd just i'd just stay right up there okay they all ran in there everything's good keep this pin out of the way so you can close the gate gates closed and uh pins dropped sorry about that gosh i might okay now the only compartment left to load is the one we're standing in so this one i get out of the trailer and then pretty self-explanatory may run the cattle on if i can see i count if a cane i don't and then i generally have a hold of my up rope with my left hand and the downside with my right and then i just close the gate on them that's it okay one more thing i want to show y'all and then that'll be it okay so now we're back up here at the nose and uh we're going to get this uh calf deck ready to go up in the air all right okay so if you're hauling big cows like full grown ones not ones going to a feed yard they wouldn't be able to physically fit right there it'd be too short they'd rub the backs so what you do is you crank this uh winch right here and then that deal over there starts coming up in the air you just cranky cranky crank go [Music] okay so now the cows have way more vertical room so this right here is the height of the calf deck which is about chest height on me so now they have way more room uh vertically and uh what you would do is what i'm going to do you pull these rails out of their little space set them up here right there all the way around and then you set the deck back on top of it so hopefully this thing don't fall on my head okay so there's three positions to a nose right this is only a two position those but normally there's three so the up way up in the air which is storage okay that's just getting it out of the way so you can load big cows down here in the bottom okay then this deck right here where you can double deck is called a calf rail and that's so you can put calves on bottom and then calves on top on this section then there's another one which this trailer doesn't have and that's called a fat rail and ordinarily on one of those you would have your permanent one which this one's permanent it would be down here and then you would have uh these things but stouter that you could move from the storage position back down to here to make a calf rail so the fat rail what that would do is that would essentially just uh eliminate this ramp right here and make a level uh area out of this and the reason for that is because i guess because fat cattle don't like to climb ramps i don't know i'm not a cowboy i'm just a truck driver so and then and and and you know that that's good for like uh you know uh say if a cow's crippled and you got a hauler somewhere you know what's good for that way she ain't got to do all this work to climb up and down it makes it a whole lot easier on her or him bulls get crippled too so um anyways that's it i don't know if i should leave the calf deck up or leave it down it was up when i got it so i'll put it back up go ahead and show y'all how to do that so you move those little retainer tabs out the way hopefully i've got it high enough i might have to go get her a little higher okay that one's in [Music] i have a little trouble with this all right there we go now put this in hold it up there but that don't make much sense because it can slide out so we want to do it like so that way we have these little tabs in place to keep it from sliding backwards and forwards in the correct places i had right here so right there so that way it's on opposite sides on the front of that one on the back of that one it can't go anywhere then come up here and uh just set her back down and that's that the decks and the storage and you want that uh hatch flop backwards that way your this is called the counterbalance this thing right here that way your counterbalance has somewhere to swing because if your deck was flipped forward you couldn't you couldn't open your counterbalance so that's it guys that's pretty much uh my little crash course on how to load a cow trailer okay so if you wanna know how i decide my head counts uh yesterday i had 84 head so ordinarily with a head count that high normally you know we're hauling like 60 or 70 right of bigger bigger cattle so with a head count that high hey if you're hauling 60 or 70 a low head count you wouldn't load the top deck you wouldn't load the jail because the cattle would be too big to fit uh in the top deck of the jail you know so you would just load your your ends and the middles which is the middle is where i'm standing and there's one on top and bottom so with those high hit and it's the same rule all right typically from what i was taught you want to take about 10 of your total load and put it in the bottom nose and since the back is the same size as the front you'll do the same thing on the back and split the middles okay that's not the situation i was in yesterday yesterday i i was told 85 but they ended up putting 84 on me so what i told them was i wanted nine in the bottom i want to i you they don't they don't care where you're putting them you just tell them your cuts so 974 28 28 9 okay i ended up with nine seven four twenty eight twenty eight and eight so with a head count that high i was scared of running out of room in the middles so i took an extra one and put him in the bottom nose and then uh my shoes are getting rained on this is fantastic took an extra one put him in the bottom nose and then i went seven in the top nose four in the jail 28 up here where we're standing 28 directly below us and 8 on the back so you want 10 10 roughly half of that because your gel is half the size of your nose and uh split the middles and then your noses if they'll fit in the bottom they'll fit in the top so i could have went 99 for 28 28 and i guess that'll left me six on the back but you don't want a compartment with a whole bunch of room and then all the rest of them jam cram tight so these cow trailers the axles are all the way on the back so that makes uh makes it real heavy on your drives and especially when you go to double decking cows like what i did up here or double decking steers um so i didn't put nine and nine i put nine and seven so i put nine took two off of my nine up top to make seven put them in the gel one more off each middle put them in the jail and that left me with eight in the back so that's how i come up with that so roughly ten percent maybe plus one then you could do ten percent up top but you'd be really really heavy on your drives and then half of that in the jail 10 again in the back you know roughly plus or minus one depending on what you need to do every little situation is different and then split your middles and same thing this gate here is in this gate here uh cuts this uh compartment exactly in half so i could have went like this and i could have gone uh and there's there's one in the bottom two ah okay so i could have gone uh nine seven fourteen or well i would have went nine seven four fourteen fourteen and then on the bottom fourteen fourteen and eight could have done that but i don't like to get cattle if i don't have to because that just gives me an extra chance of getting kicked in the teeth and i don't like taking those sorts of chances so that's pretty much that guys that's how you load uh how i load a cow trailer then you know if you were picking up sale barns and you had a bunch of different cuts then of course you would want to load based on size ability probably would call temperament into question you know you wouldn't want to put a real docile tiny one with an aggressive big one with horns whether or not they have horns you'd want to consider that if uh probably if they had horns you might want to put them in the bottom that way they don't get up here and screw up your roof too bad uh and also uh generally in the bottom you don't have to get in there with them as much so uh i really wouldn't want to crawl up top if i had something mean that had horns on it so me personally i mean sometimes you have to but uh so that would be you know if you had a bunch of cuts you know which two four six eight cuts is all you can handle you know that's it that's all the compartments i have having it one two three four five six on the bottom seven and eight and also you could fold this right here down but you need a deck out chute to load it from the rear and make this a full compartment which i've never done that ever in my life i've never even seen a deck out shoot ever in my life and then you could load you could double out your excuse me you could double out the back end too some trailers have that not all trailers do so this is a tandem closed tandem uh feeder pot a fat trailer would not have any of that nose stuff in it it would just be a floor straight through to the front and uh you know but this is a feeder pot so it can haul high head counts so you could of smaller animals and also it can take the big ones too but it weighs a little more and it gives you a little more uh flexibility with as far as your cuts are concerned if you're if you're picking up sale barns and have you know if you got eight heifers and two bulls and four steers and three babies and two mamas and a big bull and it all has to be kept separate well then you got your you know you got your cuts and of course you wouldn't want to put your big bull up there on the top because he ain't gonna fit and uh uh you can't put him in the jail cause he ain't gonna fit you know if i had one big bull that had to be kept by himself if i had the room for it i'd try to put him on the back if it was me that way i didn't have to get in the trailer with him me that's me or a big anything that needed to be kept by itself uh that's what i would do so that's pretty much the rundown i'm not the uh a1 primo cow hauler by any stretch of the imagination but i've hauled a handful of loads of them in my ten in my tenure still do i guess somewhat occasionally about the time i think i'm never ever gonna haul one i go haul one or about time i think i'm never gonna haul another one i go haul another one so yesterday we had 84 steers we took them down from uh houston up to central oklahoma kind of pretty much down down there around houston took them out to central oklahoma and uh unloading them they were not very fun to unload because they were fresh didn't really know what was going on a few of them were a little aggressive a lot a lot of them were uh you know just lost in the sauce you know they spent their whole lives in a pasture now here they are in a trailer and they're like what i ain't never seen one of these before man what the hell so anyways that's the dealio let's see how wet my shoes got ah not too bad so that's it guys hope y'all enjoyed it and uh we'll catch y'all guys around on the next one

Channel: Wandering Pete

Views: 151,981

Rating: 4.9088688 out of 5

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Id: QSBglqSpmN0

Length: 30min 15sec (1815 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 24 2021