July 7, 2001 ~ Bye, Emma
This morning we loaded Emma and a heifer calf into the trailer, and Larry is presently hauling them to the auction. Poor Emma. She was born here, you know. She has only left the farm to go the vet. I shouldn't be thinking about this; it simply can't be helped.
When we first moved here, nearly eight years ago, I was the "softie." The one with thin skin, the one who never wanted anything to suffer, the one who didn't want anyone to kill a snake or a coyote, even if they were smack-dab in the middle of killing our animals. I cried when we took our first calves to auction. Made a point of telling them that this was Larry's idea, not mine. Felt like the meanest person in the universe, that's for sure. But time has passed, and I've changed. Have learned a few things. Now I know that there are limits, that there are difficult deicisions which must be made, and that sometimes you just have to grit your teeth and go on.
Now I will tell Larry if there is a coyote after a calf, and I've been known to kill poisonous snakes that were by the back door. Have even killed a snake that was in the chicken house, because it was eating all the eggs. And when Emma didn't bond with this calf the other day, as far as I was concerned, it was a done deal. It's far too expensive to keep these animals as pets, and Emma has run up quite a vet bill in her life, first one thing and then another. So she has become a liability. It's called "culling," removing the least desirable animals from the herd, and it simply has to be done. If you'd have asked me about this five years ago, I would have said "No way!"
When Emma lost her first calf, we went to a local dairy and got a little Holstein calf for her to raise. What a pain. That calf developed a few problems of its own (caused by the stress of moving to our farm) and had to be given medicine daily. We called it "Uh-oh," because every time it saw me coming it knew I was about to squirt medicine down its throat... so it jumped up, thinking, "Uh-oh, here that crazy woman comes again!" Uh-oh's problems spread to the other calves in the herd, and pretty soon, that inexpensive dairy calf wound up costing us a lot of money. So we won't make that mistake again. When Emma lost her most recent calf, and when someone (someone NOT in the cattle business) suggested that we get her a calf to raise, I could decisively say, "Nope. Been there, done that. Not going to do that again."
This morning Larry was waffling back and forth... did we want to sell Emma now or later? And wasn't she a nice cow? And he sure did hate to sell her at all. Maybe we should give her one more chance? So I pulled out the records and we talked about the expenses, all the bills, and his face... fell.
That's all she wrote. Had to be done. But I never thought I'd live to see the day when I had to convince Larry of the need to sell a cow.
Poor Emma. I sure hate to see her go. Can't be helped, though... it can't be helped.
All rights reserved
_______________________________