LARS Open House

On this wet afternoon, we went to the Large Animal Research Station (LARS) open house. They were showing off their new additions i.e. musk ox babies. There was quite the crowd there and they had a table set up for naming the new additions. The popular themes seemed to be Disney princesses and Star Wars characters.

In addition to musk ox, there were what I thought were caribou. The kids called them reindeer (they were right), and some large, long-haired breed of cattle supposedly for the vet program. The ground was pretty muddy. Earlier today, I was just up the road for the ham radio test session and the owner of the home said that it had rained almost 0.75" in the last 24 hours. I guess I wasn't paying too much attention.

I think the majority of the people were there to see the musk ox and here are four of them running around the pen. Every time the handlers brought them down towards the fence to show them off, they would run back up to the upper part of the pen away from all of the phone cameras.

Here is one of the adults feeding on birch leaves that the handlers brought down to the fence line to lure them down. In this pen were two more baby musk ox that were a bit older. They harvest the wool from the adults and spin it into yarn. The gift shop was selling these small skeins of wool for $100/oz. Pretty pricey! They also sold finished products such as hats and scarfs.