Getting 'tutored'

Guess what Mr. Darcy did today?

That's right, he got "tutored"! I took him to the vet this morning for a de-nutting procedure.

Now he's home recuperating, doubtless wondering what hit him.

The worst thing of all? He has to go a whole week -- seven days -- without running! How will he ever survive?

Sometimes a veterinarian isn't necessary

We've had some grim moments this week.

A few days ago, Don shot our barn cat. This little lady adopted us shortly after we arrived in Idaho 13 years ago. At the time, she was presumably a young cat but of an unknown age, and for all these years she was Don's faithful companion in the shop. He's doctored her for a few things over the years, but advancing age and a lack of teeth meant it was almost impossible for her to get any nutrition, no matter how much Don tried to alter the consistency, presentation, and variety of food. Essentially she was starving.

When I suggested we take her into the vet to have her put down, he disagreed. She's lived virtually her whole life on the farm. To suddenly get bundled into a box and driven somewhere strange would be more traumatic than to take care of the matter himself. As he put it, sometimes it's the kindest thing you can do for an old friend. Choosing the right moment when the cat didn't see it coming, he put her out of her misery. Then he came back inside and wrapped me in a hug for a long, long time.

Then yesterday, our new neighbors (who inherited two horses with the property) called in alarm, asking which vet we could recommend. They were concerned one of the horses had a broken leg. Don first called another neighbor D., who is a horse expert. While waiting for D. to arrive, we walked over and looked at the horse, who was right at our fence line.

It was unmistakable. This beautiful animal clearly had a horribly broken right foreleg. She stood trembling and breathing heavily in her pain. No one saw how she had attained such an injury, but a horse with a broken leg is pretty hopeless.

When D. came over, he had a .45 strapped to his hip. He and Don went over to the neighbor's pasture and consulted with them, then gave the horse a fast checkup and confirmed she had broken her leg in three places. Calling a vet wasn't necessary.

D. haltered the other (healthy) horse and put her in the barn (out of sight). Then he asked the grieving neighbors to go into their house. Don stayed with D. because, as he told me later, he wanted to see how putting down a large animal humanely was done.

I came into the house and told Younger Daughter not to be surprised when she heard a gunshot, which came within minutes.

Meanwhile I called around until I found someone with a backhoe to dig a hole sufficiently large to bury the horse.

No need to call a vet in hopeless circumstances, especially when there are good men like Don and D. who unshirkingly do what must be done.

Vaccinating cattle

The vet came today.

It's always a big occasion when the vet comes.  Farm calls are expensive so we try to get as much done in one fell swoop as possible.

Today we needed to get Bang's shots for two heifers as well as Lutalyse shots for a yearling heifer and Matilda, our Jersey.

But before we could welcome the vet, we needed to get ready.  This included a couple of stout O-rings to hold ropes attached to thrashing animals...

...as well as adding a removable board above the barn gate to keep panicked animals from jumping the gate.  Don did these in the morning.

Then we borrowed some neighbor boys for extra "bodies" and started herding the cattle from the pasture into the corral.  Then we picked off the ones we didn't need and shooed the two calves into the barn.  Let's just say this was easier said than done.

Here's Smokey, Ruby's calf, looking highly suspicious.

I managed to get a rope around her neck, to her immense disgust.

We needed to fit her with a halter.  Here's our basket of halters.  Surely one will fit?

No such luck.  Don had to take the closest-fitting one into the shop...

...and burn three more holes in order to tighten it enough.

After a minor rodeo, I got the halter on the calf and attached a rope to it to make it easier to catch her.  As it turned out, the halter was still too big and came off her nose.  Oh well.

Next came Raven, now just a bit over a year old.

Surprisingly, she was a whole lot easier to handle than Smokey.  I fit her with a halter and rope without much trouble.

Make a note: always remember to wear mud boots, not my new thrift-store sneakers, into the barn.

When the vet arrived, the first thing we did was give Matilda a shot of Lutalyse.  Lutalyse is an abortant.  After her ill-timed heat cycle last April, we needed to abort the fetus or we'd have a calf born in January, which would almost guarantee a dead calf in our harsh Idaho winters.  We prefer to breed our cows in late August or early September so the calves are born in late spring.  This will be easier to control once we build a bull pen for Gimli.

But meanwhile poor Matilda needed a shot of Lutalyse.  She was not amused.

Then it was Raven's turn.  Raven also needed a shot of Lutalyse, not only because we don't want a calf born in winter, but also because she's still too young to have a calf.  We like to breed our heifers at about 15 months of age, so they'll be just about two years old when they have their first calf.  Once she aborts the fetus, she'll go into a heat cycle and Gimli can breed her.  This way her calf will be born next spring when she's about two years old.

But Raven needed more than a Lutalyse shot.  She also needed her Bang's shot, which also requires an ear tag, and ear tattoo, and a blood sample (because she's older than a year).  Here the vet is trying to draw blood.  Raven didn't cooperate, so after more rodeo antics the vet got the blood out of a neck vein.

After this it was Smokey's turn.  All Smokey needed was a Bang's shot, her ear tattoo, and her ear clip.  Sorry, we didn't get any photos of this because it was, er, rather a lively event.

That's it for vet calls!  We should be good until next year.

Dehorning Raven

Unless you have polled cattle, you need to dehorn your calves. "Polled" is a genetic mutation that results in hornless cattle, a highly desirable trait because let me tell you - dehorning is a pain in the butt. And foot, and belly, and back, and arms, and anywhere else a thrashing animal can jab you.

We only dehorn our heifer (female) calves, not the bull calves. We steer (castrate) all our bull calves and put them in the freezer when they're two years old, so there's no sense wasting a good dehorning if all we're going to do is eat them.

But heifers grow into cows, and cows hang around for many years. Our two herd matrons have horns, and we wish they didn't. So we make it a policy to dehorn all our heifers.

For years, old Doc White came out and dehorned our heifers when they were less than six months old. Doc White was the beloved farm vet in this area. I know for a fact that he'd come out to our place, wrestle a calf into submission with hardly a blink of an eye, and administer shots, dehorn, castrate, eartag, or whatever else needed to be done, without hardly breaking a sweat.

But Doc White passed away a few months ago, and for several months prior to that his health didn't permit him to do large animal work. God almighty, but I hope Doc White is whooping it up in heaven right now because he sure made our lives easier here on earth. I miss him greatly.

One of the techniques used to dehorn a calf is to use a giant pair of loppers (for lack of better term). The blades of the loppers are half-circles, so when the blades come together around the horn base, in theory the torque of bringing the handles together chops the horn off. The bigger the horn, the harder it is to chop. Then after the horn is removed (and believe me, blood is involved) you need to cauterize the horn bud to prevent regrowth. The whole ordeal is painful and terrifying for the calf and not a whole lotta fun for the humans either.

Because of losing Doc White, we'd put off dehorning our heifer Ebony until she was about ten months old - BIG mistake, because this meant her horns were now about five or six inches long. And - no offense - we made another mistake by bringing in a female vet to do the dehorning. She was terrific - she showed my husband the place and technique to administer intramuscular shots to cattle - but she simply didn't have the nonchalant arm strength Doc White had when it came to dehorning.

A ten-month-old calf is a whole lot bigger and stronger than a younger calf. Suffice it to say, dehorning Ebony was a nightmare. A bloody, struggling, painful, noisy nightmare...and it left a scur (a scur is an incompletely-removed horn, which will grow back - and for some reason often curls around and grows into the animal's skull unless it's removed again later). The loppers hadn't been sharpened, which made the job harder. We'll never again use this particular vet for dehorning.

Additionally, poor Ebony now totally distrusts us. We've ruined this sweet calf's disposition by waiting so long and inflicting such pain on her. Never, never again.

So this time, with the birth of Raven last Sunday, we decided to try something new: dehorning paste.

Dehorning paste is just that - a paste you apply to a young calf's horn buds. It's a nasty caustic material which essentially burns the buds away and prevents them from growing. While this sounds cruel, I can assure you (if the calf's behavior is anything to go by) the pain is minimal and the results superb. We'd heard about this for years and are kicking ourselves for not having gotten some sooner.

Firstly, we could do it ourselves - we didn't need to call the vet (farm calls are expensive). However there's a fairly narrow window when the paste is most effective, when the calf is between three and ten days old. So on Wednesday, when Raven was three days old, we isolated her in the milking pen and gave it a go.

First we used clippers to shave off the top of her head where the horn buds were. We could see the small bumps under the surface of her skin. Then, while Don held her still, I used a popsicle stick to spread a thin, nickle-sized smear of paste on the horn buds. I was careful not to get it in her eyes, of course. She was calm during all this.

The toughest part was wrapping her head up in duct tape. My, how she struggled! We needed to put the duct tape around her so she wouldn't hurt her mama while nursing by rubbing the caustic paste on Ruby's udder. We made sure her ears were free from the duct tape, of course.

When all that was done, we pushed her out of the pen to her by-now frantic mama. How she sulked! She was tired from her struggles, too, which gave us a very drooping calf:







We removed the duct tape the next afternoon, and Raven's been bouncy and cheerful ever since. She'll soon forget the indignity of having us manhandle her as we did. There was little to no pain. No blood. It's over and done. Why the hell didn't we do this years ago?



Talk about a dirty look!