Highland Cattle Wash Day at Pollok Country Park

Highland Cattle Wash Day at Pollok Country Park  Members of the public get up close to the Highland cattle at Pollok Country Park on Was Day.

Transcript

00:00Hi, I'm Hannah Walsh and we're here at Pollock Country Park and I am the Livestock Apprentice.

00:05Behind me here we have Una Roo. She is our two-year-old heifer. She's currently being

00:10groomed right now. We have just finished our wash day here at Pollock Park. This is our second

00:15wash day of the year. So we had roughly between 30 to 40 members of the public here to see how we

00:22get animals ready for showing and they were able to get hands-on. So the animals here were brought

00:27in from the field, we tie them up and we'll give them a hose down and then what we'll do is we'll

00:32grab our shampoo. We have tea tree shampoo and coconut so if they have a wee bit of dandruff we'll use the

00:37tea tree shampoo. We'll scrub it right in, get them right down to the skin, make sure we get all that

00:43dirt off of them and you can see the colour change in the shampoo which was really good for the public

00:48to see and then what we do is we wash all the shampoo off and we comb them down. So we comb them

00:54down first to make sure we get all the knots out and then what we do is we make a middle parting

00:59down their hair using two combs and then we back comb their hair up and we showed the public how

01:04exactly we get them ready for showing. They've dried off very quickly as it's a hot day but also

01:10because their stomachs produce a lot of heat it helps to dry them off quite quickly. If it wasn't a

01:15hot day like today we also have a blow dryer that we'll bring out that just helps get some of that

01:20excess water off of them. So we make sure that we use quiet docile animals for our wash days and for

01:26showing. If the cow doesn't seem to be enjoying it we will not use them for showing and for washing.

01:33You can see here Una is tilting her head to the side so she's enjoying that scratch that she's getting

01:38with the comb right now. The majority of our cows they do quite like a pamper day.