Horses and Flies Were My Destiny

When I was young, I was always into horses. We didn’t have horses on our farm - we were pure cow people, but my uncle George was a horse rancher. He had about 25 horses on his farm and it was a happy day when the day came around when I was to go and stay with him and his family for a week or two. He had a son who was about the same age as me and we used to get on real well together. Our farm was right beside the town in Wyoming. We used to be able to walk down the street and go to the shop or to the playground or visit other folks or whatever. At uncle George’s place, he was really out in the boonies. You certainly couldn’t go walking anywhere unless it was just for the sake of going for a walk somewhere. Back then, I was interested in childish things and walking aimlessly wasn’t one of them. However, I really did love to go and stay on Uncle George’s big ranch and hang out with my cousin Ralph. It didn’t bother me in the slightest because I just loved every second of my annual vacation. It was meant to last a week but it always stretched out for at least two and then the next year, I’d be bargaining for it to stretch even further. We got to hang around horses all day long. It would start in the morning after our breakfast at about 8am. Breakfast at their house was always hearty. We’d have poached eggs and bacon and beans. I felt just like a cowboy before I even went outside! Then Ralph and I would go and join Uncle George down at the arena. It was an indoor barn that was just about the biggest thing I had ever seen. You could have fit about a thousand people in there and maybe about 500 horses. I don’t know - I never really measured it but it was big. He told me once that his daddy used to give it to the local football team so that they could use it for training when it was too cold to train outside in the winter. That got me thinking: I used to stand there looking all around, imagining the football players laying out their moves, then running, throwing and kicking with the horses galloping all around them! So all of this gave me a solid grounding in understanding and loving horses and the whole business of looking after them. There was only one thing that I was ever going to be when I was older, and that was a rancher. It was coursing through my veins and coming out of every pore in my body. But the big problem that we had our first year of operation on the ranch was that of fly control. We didn’t know what to do about fly prevention. Uncle George just never seemed to have any trouble with flies. I even called him and asked him about flies get rid of them, but he just scratched his head and said “I don’t figure we used to have much of them back then” and put down the phone. So I had to learn to become a fly killer of the blue green flies and the flies and dogs that were making my horses’ lives a misery. I finally discovered fly predators after much tentative use of harsh chemicals. They are the ultimate solution - no side-effects, no smell, just flies gone and back to the way things used to be in the heyday of Uncle George.