Oct. 07, 2007 ~ Down
For a farmer or rancher, "down" is generally a bad thing. As in fences down, trees down, or a horse or cow who is down and can't get up. This morning we awoke to all of these things. Just another day on the farm. Husband and I are both pretty well beat.
One of our cows, Bertha Marie, gave birth to a pretty little heifer yesterday. This morning Bertha collapsed and has still not gotten up. Milk fever, the vet thinks. We called right away, as soon as she went down, but our regular horse/cow vet was out of town, and his associate was tied up in emergency surgery. She (the associate) came as soon as she could, but I guess it wasn't soon enough, or it just wasn't meant to be, because the treatment didn't help, and tomorrow we are probably going to have to put the cow down. We did everything possible to get her up, but she just can't do it.
Her calf get scared and ran through the fence onto the road. sigh. It's been one of THOSE days. Husband caught the calf and carried her most of the way back. She is now in Bucky's stall and we gave her a bottle tonight. Nearly drowned her in the process. Poor baby. We are out of milk replacer, so I went to the store for whole milk, and will get some milk replacer at the feed store tomorrow.
While all this was going on we realized we had a tree down, and it had fallen on the fence, doing a lot of damage. So Husband spent the morning fixing the fence, while waiting for the vet.
Remember the secret kitten/office cat? She's at our house, in a big dog crate, complete with litter pan, food and water. I only planned to have Dr. Susan give her a few shots, but when I went to pick her up, Dr. S. had spayed her, too. She threw that in for good measure! So we have a recovering surgical patient in the living room, who hisses quite a lot.
Bottle-feeding a calf isn't easy, especially at first, when she's fighting the bottle. Eventually it won't be so hard. But these next few days will be rough. Husband will be getting up at 4:30; I'll probably be up by 5:00, and we'll give her the bottle. Then I'll need a shower before work. One other thing, calves who are severely stressed usually get sick, so we have that to look forward to.
Did I mention that we were tired?
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