Given Over

The boss always inspected the livestock while they were still on the trailer. Sometimes he let one of his sons or best hands do that, but it had to be someone he trusted. (He let the wrong person do the inspection once. That did not turn out well for anyone.) If the animals were sick or diseased, he refused them on the spot - sometimes to the extreme irritation of the one who had brought them there. This inspection was important because once officially "given over", the livestock became our responsibility.

And once we accepted the animals and led them off the trailer - through the narrow chute and into our pens - we took good care of them. We typically held them in the outer pens only long enough to give them a good warm-water washing so they would not track mud and manure into the inner pens. The inner pen had a sheet metal roof that kept them out of the sun and the rare West Texas rain. That pen had a rough concrete floor and was divided by commercial-grade pipe fencing into three long sections that ran parallel to each other with sturdy gates at the end of each run. Now, the animals might take slightly different paths through the pen, but there was really only one way in and one way out. Livestock might be held in the covered pens for a short time if we were busy or short-handed. The boss always made sure the animals were fed if they were there more than a few hours. But it was never a long wait. Soon enough the counter-weighted galvanized door would slide open and the livestock would be led from the perpetually soiled holding pens into a well lit room with shiny tiled walls and a smooth, clean concrete floor. The floor was sealed with a clear water-proof coating and marked here and there with wide yellow bands; it sloped gradually to a grated six-inch drain in the middle of the room. The wench control usually hung within a few feet of the drain, just about five or six feet off the floor. Some of the animals balked a little at the entrance to this room, probably when they caught wind of what was ahead. Ultimately, every animal that went down the trailer ramps – every animal that came through that chute – also went through that sliding door.

I don’t really know what happened to the livestock that were not given over to us for slaughter.

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For the Lord is enraged against all the nations,

and furious against all their host; he has devoted them to destruction, has given them over for slaughter. (Isaiah 34:2, ESV)