Its All About the Animals

 

This past weekend here in Cedar City, we had our annual Livestock Festival.  The weather was perfect, and all of the events were highly entertaining.  We had venders, a rodeo, a sheep herding demonstration, draft horse competition to see which pair of horses could pull the most weight, an antique tractor pull, a Dutch oven cook off, cowboy poetry, and an excellent quilt show, to name a few of the events.  There was something for everyone.  Lots of community spirit to go around, too.

I was especially entertained by the goat roping competition featuring teams of 4 elementary school children per team trying to get a rope around a goat’s neck.  The goats were freaked out and huddled together in a very small fenced off area.  There were several adult men in the enclosure whose job it was to get the goats out in the middle so that the kids could get to them.  What a hoot! 

Of course, the highlight was the sheep parade on Saturday morning.  The original pioneer settlers in this area herded sheep and cattle.  There are still many ranches here to this day where this is done.  The sheep are down here in the valley in the winter, and up in the mountains for pasture in the summer.  They are all brought back down in October, and the big finale for the Saturday parade involves 1000 sheep being herded down Main Street. 

Here are some photos from the parade.  I am just showing animals and children.  A herd of Texas Longhorns brought up from Kanab Utah starts things off.

Pioneer wagons.

Rodeo Princess and an attendant.

Horses.

This ranch breeds mini horses.  

This little boy looks like he is falling asleep!

It looks like these are twins.

This one waved to the crowd the whole way.

Draft horses.  Once a staple working horse for every ranch or farm, now only bred for show and competition.

Another budding cowboy!

Here come the sheep.

This is the only black sheep that I noticed in the whole flock.

So there you have it.  What a fun day.