"I'm a fawn, I'm a fawn..."

Someone was mooing all last night. She had shut up by the time I went out this morning, but I suspected it might be 170. Partly because when we palpated cows a couple of weeks ago, she was so pregnant the calf practically came up and shook my hand. But mainly because when I walked out this morning she tried to kill the dogs. Granted, Danny was pretty much asking for it (don't take a border collie into a pasture full of mama cows. He has no sense and they have no tolerance), but still, 170 has been pretty easy going until today. She was looking around with a sort of strained expression, like she had left something--say, a calf--somewhere and couldn't remember where exactly.

I gave up on waiting for her to remember and walked the fences. And, way off to one side of the big pasture we just opened up yesterday, was a calf lying half under the fence. The grass was really deep and he was pretending to be a fawn. I hauled him out from under the fence, at which point he decided this fawn thing wasn't working out and bolted away across the pasture, through a fence, and into a huge patch of thistle. These would be the six foot high thistles. The calf plopped down and resumed being a fawn.

I yelled for 170, who amazingly enough responded (all the cows were hanging around out of sight among the trees on Roundtop). She came walloping down the hill (walloping: like galloping, but with a full udder) , through the gate, and headed toward the far side of the pasture, so I think she finally remembered where she'd left the calf. Only now the calf was in a patch of thistle pretending he didn't exist.

"Yo, 170," I said. "Your calf is here." I pointed. She didn't get it. She did stop moving, though, so I started in through the thistles to get the calf up. He exploded out of the thistles and ran toward the gate. I ran in the opposite direction, just in case 170 decided it was all my fault and took a detour to thump me. But she was catching up with her calf, who finally stopped running when he realized milk was now available.

Long story short: cow reunited with calf, person not trampled.

Breeding cows and washing drills

The two days a week of "actual work" seems to be working. Now that I'm more or less trained in at the OR, it's less frightening and painful. I haven't done a stupid thing there for a whole week! (as of tomorrow) By the by, don't put drills and their fancy attachments into the ultrasound (it's a soap bath in addition to the ultrasound bit).

I still have some definite problems with an eight-hour work day. Oh, for a two hour siesta.

The other five days of the week are much more fun. Not only do I get the siesta, I get to play with cows and garden. I've become very nostalgic for the summers I spent training show cows, since there's nothing like dragging a cow around on a lead rope for a couple of hours to make you feel like you've accomplished something in the day. I can't do that now, of course, since the heifers are crazy wild, and I don't have anywhere to show them anyway. But breeding cows is a nice substitute. I get to feel smart that I can identify a cervix via rectal palpation. I only get two weeks to practice though--in July, my job is being outsourced to the bull.

The other good part of breeding cows is that I get to spend so much time just watching them. That's an aspect of vet medicine I feel I'm going to have a lot of trouble with. "What do you mean, work with other people's animals? Without two hours of observation?!"

Plus, I'm spoiled by having very professional cows. We don't keep any cows that kick or shake their heads at us, and you can usually talk them into going through a specific gate. Besides, they're Angus. I'm afraid this has left me with a strong opinion of what a "proper cow" looks like, which makes the far-more prevalent Holstein look like a sad, warped version of a bovine.

How it looks from here

Photographic proof! 170 reunited with her calf, the cows and calves enjoying the pasture, and, Yes, the hen has that many chicks (and there are more running around elsewhere).

On call already?

Diagnosis: sick calf
Treatment: repeated poking with needles and tubes

I got back to my apartment after work on Saturday, wanting nothing but to sleep for an hour or two. My mom calls, and there's a sick sick calf at home. Since I'm the vet service for anything that doesn't need a real vet, I had to go home. It was just like being on call, and I haven't even started vet school yet! I forced myself awake, and talked my boyfriend into accompanying me home, and we went to see what the problem was.

The calf had a temperature and was listless. So listless that I probably could have given her the shot of antibiotics without sitting on her, but not quite so listless that she was going to swallow the sulfa drugs on the first try. The sulfa drugs come in the form of blue boluses, which you break in half before stuffing down the calf's throat...I had to give her 4 halves. I thought I had all of them down, but then I peered into her mouth and, surprise! 4 blue chunks that she was ready to spit out. On the second try I got her to swallow them all. And then we tubed her with electrolytes, which look like nothing so much as Tang.

I voted to stay at home and sleep, which meant the next morning I had to get up at 5 am to drive in to work. There were rather a lot of kennels to clean, for a Sunday. Thank goodness--otherwise I would have felt that going in was a waste. The calf, meanwhile, was still listless, though she was oddly eager to drink water from a bucket. Not normal behavior for a 3-week old. At least her mom hung around most of the day. Sometimes the cows don't do such a good job of keeping an eye on their calves. It was just as well that she went off to graze later, though. We tubed the calf with powerade, the electrolyte-substitute, and gave her a shot of Banamine. Banamine just to make her feel better.

This morning I found her in the wrong pasture. She had tried to follow her mom, I think, and wandered under the wrong wire. I escorted her at a slow walking pace all the way across the pasture. Her mom, whose pacience had been exhausted by yesterday's fast, stayed where she was and only occasionally gave an encouraging moo, through a mouthful of grass.

The final installation of shots was a single Nuflor injection this evening. This time I had to catch the calf, and I'm afraid she won't forgive me this time. Nuflor is a nasty sort of thing--super thick, and she needed a lot of it. At least I didn't have to force feed her any more energy drinks.

When lambs calve, and other oddities

Vet school starts in two and a half weeks, and I've entered the giddy contemplation stage. Attendant to this is a compulsion to read blogs by vet students, and once I did that there was nothing for it but I must have one for my own. Yes! I too shall blog. Consistently, even, maybe. Though let's not be hasty. Let us remember what happened to the food blog (three entries total).

But anyway. The cows are out in the pasture where they're supposed to be, the calves are more or less on the right side of the fence with the cows. The dogs are hassling the chickens again. I have had to rethink my stance on broody hens. I hate tossing a mound of eggs out when I have no clue how close to hatching they are...but as a result we have a serious infestation of chicks. Thirty? Forty? Even Danny's getting tired of chasing them, and he's an obsessive compulsive Border Collie! Every now and then I hear a squawk from outside and have to run out, scream "DANNY!!" and wait until he bounces into view and sees me: "What?!"