kayre | Project 365 (Reply)

Ox pulling today! And full of drama....

The oxen are scarily intense when they're pulling-- and so relaxed between turns that they aren't even tied! In fact, two owners each had two teams, and simply left one team standing, untied and unattended, while they worked the other.

The drama came from this driver, who was so violent that he would have been disqualified had he not washed out early. He was screaming, hitting full strength with his stick (which is a violation of the rules), and when his second team failed to make a pull in the second round, struck one of them on the face, an automatic disqualification.

This man, on the other hand, had the two best trained teams I've ever seen-- so good the crowd was talking about him. The more violent the other guy got, the more this one showed off. Here he's having his team stand after being hitched; at this point there's no way to stop most teams. After about 90 seconds he stepped aside, and they pulled like champions. In fact his teams took 1st and 3rd-- and he never shouted, or touched them with the stick during a pull. (He used the stick only to tap their legs to get them to move into position.