What kinda tool is this anyway??

Picked this up in a box and contents at a local auction... With the old grease stains across this handle and most of the other things in the crate, thinking it must have been something used in general mechanics.. I've not been able to identify its function..

The way its been "sharpened", it would seem anything caught between those grippers would be in a serious hurt.

I've been calling it a Bobbitt tool..
 
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As half said, they're calf dehorners. Still available and still used--link below was the first thing that popped on Google and there's many more similar ones.
calf dehorners
 
Maybe briefly painful, but for the animal, it's similar to getting your fingernails cut. We use these on yearling-size cattle when needed, which is rare. A quick push on the handles and it's done, with hardly any bleeding. In the old days, we had an attachment for our headcatch on the chute where the animals head was laid on a table and a chain ran behind the ears and was cranked down so they couldn't move, then each horn was manually sawed off with a specially made dehorning saw. Usually a lot of bleeding, and since we had mostly horned cattle in those days, it was a TON of work dehorning 3 or 400 calves in a day. As a side note, dad used to swear by something out of the Farmers Almanac, which said certian phases of the moon were best to limit bleeding during dehorning. Not sure there was truth to it, but when there was more bleeding than normal, dad would say we should have waited for the moon to be right.
 
It is the kind of tool that you never tell your wife about. We had a real large slice type dehorner for adult cows. Slice off the horns of a cow that was bullying the others and that cow would become meek and mild real fast when she realized that she no longer had horns. Eventually we went to all polled Shorthorns and eliminated the horn problem.
 
As others have said, calf dehorners. When I was in Ag school we used these to do some calves. Sounded kinda gross to scoop out the horns but very little bleeding and they didn't seem to notice or have a problem with it. Biggest issue seemed to be going too deep and leaving a big hole in their head. Had a guy in our class that was always screwing up stuff like that. We were castrating pigs one time and he sliced the belly of one open and the intestines fell out. Luckily there was a vet there who sewed it up. We had Angus feeders at home so never needed to use a dehorner.
 

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