When a 600-pound animal is barrelling towards you, there is no time to be scared.
So says Harold Kerr, who for 40 years has been a cattle brand inspector in the Smithers area and since 1993 he has been the area supervisor from Prince George west. It wasn’t a lifelong career goal, but it’s been an excellent career nonetheless, he said, of his start in 1968 following a newspaper ad.
“Oh, I’ve had plenty of cows chase me, lots of them, but after awhile you learn. When you’re in a pen of cattle, you take a look at them and you can tell if there’s something in that pen that’s going to chase you a bit.”
What he really wanted to be growing up was a truck driver.
“It was just in the days when you started to see the odd cattle truck on the road, and that’s something I wanted to do,” Kerr said. “It’s a kids’ dream, but this brand inspector job has kind of leaned that way a little bit.”
One thing was for certain for the young Kerr, though, and that was he wanted to work with cattle. Kerr was born in the Bulkley Valley on his parents’ farm in Quick, B.C. a small farming community just outside of Telkwa, B.C., famous for its two steelhead bearing rivers, the Telkwa and the Bulkley. Surrounded by snow-peaked mountains, the Bulkley Valley is known for its booming tourists industry, and the trade that this brings in, as well as supporting a large farming and logging community.
It was on his parents’ farm where his love for ranching life began, who raised short horn beef, and in 1958 he went out on his own, purchasing his uncle’s spread just miles down the road to make his own mark with his new wife, Sharon. Together, the two raised two sons, Colin and Dallas.
Branding has always been important to the cattle industry. He remembers an incident a few years ago when some steers arrived on their range. It would have been a lot more difficult to find the owner of the steers had they not been wearing their owners brand.
“Those steers had come from Topley, more than 20 miles away.” Kerr said. “You’d never have suspected they’d come that far.”
“There has been the odd laugh over the years,” Kerr said. “I’ve met a lot of friends and been to a lot of places I wouldn’t have gone to otherwise.”
One of these times was up in Kispiox, he said, when he and the truck driver arrived to find nothing more than a two-wire fence and a ditch for a loading zone. The two ranchers just told the truck driver to back his rig into the ditch, and once done placed two two-by-fours down, with a piece of plywood down to make a ramp, which started one of the most interesting brand inspections that Kerr had ever done.
“Gee, I thought, like they’re going to be walking across that plywood into the truck,” Kerr said. “Let’s dream again.”
But the two seemed determined, he said, placing two more pieces of wood along the side to guide the cattle into the truck. It was one of the few times where he’d ever wished for a video camera.
“There’s just no possible way that this could work,” Kerr thought at the time.
Told to watch the bull as it had a tendency to charge, the two ranchers went in, laid some feed across the planks, and lo and behold, Kerr said, “if some of the cattle didn’t come munching, right over the plywood and into the truck.”
“I’m just sitting there, wondering how this happened,” Kerr said.
And so it went, until just two remained — the two-year-old Hereford bull and one cow, which so far had done all in its might to avoid the truck and feed-covered plywood.
While the two ranchers began loading the bull into the truck using two sticks as a make-shift corral, Kerr and the truck driver headed over to the cow, who by this time had managed to escape the fence line, and was staring at the procedure from the road. So, holding the two wires apart, they chased this cow back into the fence, but no matter what they did, they couldn’t load this cow, she was just not going to go near that truck, Kerr recalled.
In the end, the two ranchers said to ignore the cow, they’d just keep her. She was too wild, they said, so wild in fact that it was hard to believe that she was broke to lead.
What a difference that would have made, Kerr said, had they known at the start that this cow was lead trained.
“We’d have put a lead on her, lead her into the truck and they’d have followed her in,” Kerr said. “I’ve had a lot of laughs over that, but I’d have given anything to have had a video camera because I’ve never seen anything like that in my life.”
It’s the little things like that that keeps life interesting, Kerr said.”Every day is different, that’s the nice thing about it,” Kerr said.”It’s a fun job, and you meet lots of people, lots of cattle.”
While he never did become the truck driver his child self so longed to be, he’s never once looked back, taking life as it comes in the life of a brand inspector.