DX This!

I’m coming to you from the Lone Star State this week! I had to make a quick trip down here, which explains a lot of my absence. Not all of it mind you, but part of it, to be sure.

Most readers to this blog know that on the ranch we brand cattle every spring. The cattle here wear a “Lazy 33” brand on their right hip. But what a lot of you probably don’t know is that horses can be branded too;and we do brand our horses. They wear a “DX” on their right hip. In South Dakota the brands are registered with the State Brand Board but only the livestock that lives west of the Missouri river need be branded.

There are two ways to brand horses:

1. A fire brand- which is the process of using a hot iron, such as we use on calves when we brand them.
2. A freeze brand- which is the process of using a brass branding iron cooled in liquid nitrogen (At atmospheric pressure, liquid nitrogen boils at 77 K (−196 °C; −321 °F) and is a cryogenic fluid which can cause rapid freezing on contact with living tissue, which may lead to frostbite). I must say- liquid nitrogen is just cool!!! Literally and figuratively! You could also use dry ice- but it doesn’t get as cold and can be harder to use.

The difference in fire brands v. freeze brands is very obvious:

A fire brand will burn the hide of the animal so no hair grows back in its place.

A freeze brand just kills the color pigment in the hair follicle. On a lighter colored horse, such as gray, palomino or white (there’s a color blog coming later this week), it can kill the hair altogether. It’s also less painful for the horse.

Freeze branding is a pretty simple process.

Step one: get your branding irons cold! We kept our liquid nitrogen in a sealed container that had previously been used for bull semen storage- from back when they used to artificially inseminate (AI) cattle here. When it came time to use it we placed it in a cheap Styrofoam cooler, covered with a towel. The liquid nitrogen really bubbles and hisses when it gets near a lot of air! We kept a lid on it!

Step two: use some clippers to knock the hair off the hide so you can get closer to the skin.

Step two: spray the newly clipped area with 99% pure, or ethyl alcohol. You don’t want anything less than either of those, because too much water in the alcohol can cause ice crystals to form when you place the cold iron on the horse, and it can ruin the brand. We wiped the excess with a towel and then repeated the process, not wiping the second time we sprayed.

Step three: place the cold iron on the newly shaved area, and apply about 30-40lbs of pressure for about 10 seconds. To kill the hair entirely which you’d want to do on a lighter colored horse, you’d hold it for 15 seconds.

You can see the frost on the handle of the iron in the top right corner of the photo.

If you look carefully you can see the liquid nitrogen turning to gas in this photo:

This is what is the brand looks like when you remove the iron- at first it leaves a depression in the hide:

And about 30 minutes later it swells up and looks like this:

What eventually happens is that the branded area scabs over, the hide falls off, and in a couple months white hair grows in the place of the brand and it looks like this:

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how we freeze brand our horses here on the ranch.

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