If not the most asked operational question, it’s close. Ranch Manager maintains a database with relationships between entities. In order to maintain reference integrity between objects, Ranch Manager makes sure you are aware of the impact of deleting an animal (as it may have unintended consequences). In general, you should ONLY delete an animal to correct a mistake. If you are trying to delete an animal because it has died, or has been sold, then you should use the Death or Sale actions. This will move the animal out of your active herd while maintaining it’s history in your herd. So, if you really need to delete an animal from the database completely, here’s how:
- Double click on the animal to open it up in the editor.
- Select the Location History tab.
- If there are values in the table here, select them (you can use the Ctrl + A (Command on a Mac) to select all rows after selecting the first row).
- Use the red “X” button located above the table on the right to clear out the location entries.
- Repeat until all entries are removed.
- Next select the Offspring tab.
- If there are entries here, you will need to navigate to each animal’s record and change the Sire, Dam, or Surrogate Dam values to NOT refer to the animal you want to delete. Be sure to save the animal after you make each change.
- When finished return to the animal you want to delete.
- Now that all location references and all references from other animals have been cleaned up you can delete the animal. Select the red “X” in the bottom-right corner of the editor view and confirm.