Audreyvgs
Chillin' with the herd
I was at an animal auction in the middle of Florida, selling a few extra chickens and ducks, my free range population had been a tad too well fed and the raccoons at that time were somewhere else. I had way too many. I think the county says 25. HA!
In the melange of animals to be sold, some were dropped off and the owners ran, and there were others that dropped their animals off an stayed,(us), giving water to animals who didn't even have a container in their cages (thats another story) but we spied a group of shaky newborn cows in a pen there. Oh, man, how does a newborn cow, still wet looking get there? I was mad at first but then realized that the dairy industry sells off males (no milk) and COULD do worse things than bring them to auction. I at least knew they needed colostrum and I've heard of other people buying them that were going to put them in the back yard to eat grass! (at 12 hrs old???) Well, long story short, we came home with one, an auction where the guy who bid on the entire group only wanted a few, and when all the other cows became availlable at a whopping $25 apiece, my husband said, RUN! I claimed the last one, and oh, man, it was the only one i'd seen laying down, not flat, up, but still. I was a little worried.
We knew a man from our home town, he volunteered to take it home for us, and we stopped at the SuperWalmart and got calf starter milk. Colostrum came the next day when I got to the real feed store. The cow probably weighed 90 lbs. He felt wet. He'd been born the day before, the tags on their ears had the dates they were born majic markered on. He was happy to hit dirt, as we set him down, he'd been on slippery cement up til that time, and in a cage an hour to my house was'nt much more comfy.
We then got some bad advice, on feeding. It was a half gallon bottle in the am and pm, but we did too much. we did more than that. I am not advising how much here, cause no matter what, I could be wrong still, but i do know that the hole we cut in the nipple on the bottle was way too big, and he would down a half gallon of milk in no time flat. It should take more time, their little stomachs are in transition, and it caused him, in two weeks to become gravely ill.
He had progressed from a wobbly calf to a stable calf, his eyes were all whites on top, like he was scared, when he came, but as time went by, he had normal whites, like us, but better eyelashes. He was happy and bouncy and energetic. But he soon got the raging diareahh. (sp) Too much food, too fast.
He got whats called the scours. I went to site after site trying to figure out what to do, I did find a lovely forum of cattle ranchers, who took me step by step with many stories of failure to reach calves in time, and warnings of like a 30% chance I'd be able to help him. (my computer crashed that had that site marked, I lost the link, sorry ) I'll put it up when i hack that old computer.
He's a steer, isnt he. sorry.
No, he is NOW. Then he was a , O HECK. i don't know. He got banded the second day I had him, it was painless and he never noticed. He sure was one sorry thing, tho, he got the kind of diarrhea that squirts out the back, not falls... and finally he just got tired, he coudlnt stand up. Too weak to stand.
I revved into action, electrolytes in the bottle, cut off the milk, he was like 2 or 3 weeks old, and had been starting to fill out nicely!!! I was determined to do everything i could to save him. My husband brought him outside the pen with all the other animals (goats, horse, burro,pig) and he built an impromtu tent over him, to keep the sun off. In that 2 or 3 weeks, he'd gained a lot of weight! We just kept replacing the hay i put under his butt, and i would drag him away just a bit, clean up and sit back down with him.
We did electrolytes, antibiotic shots, probiotics and meanwhile I'm running back and forth between him and the computer, I'd left so many messages on so many sites, one time I had a sick goat at 2 am, and only one person emailed me, and she's still my friend 3 yrs later, I knew there HAD to be advice out there. I made concoctions I probably shouldnt have, but as I watched him sink away from me, I got desparate.
Tea. I made LaPacho? tea, I had read that antifungal oral drugs were being considered as a means to retain water, a electrolyte enhancer, and as i had no access to oral antifungals, i considered wholistic. Thats where i got that idea. I was to give him Pepto Bismol. ak, and here's where I tell you not to listen to me, do not do this, i say, as its probably not legal. I gave the cow a lomotil. I am lactose intolerant, and if I didn't have a perscription of those in my purse, i'd of died myself, as milk is even in the hamburger buns at McD's and you don't know that til you are sick about an hour later. I put one in his electolye drink twice a day, til the 5 I had left ran out. I don't think you're supposed to give this to cows that might end up in the food supply, and altho i had seen dollar signs at first, now I was seeing a truly gentle soul, laying there sick with his head on my knee. I'm thinking, o, hell. I could have made such a quick buck on this.
I could hear the "well, what did you expect for 25 bucks?" in my head, and deep in my heart I was sure that the dairy had done the right thing by letting people have actual cows for cheap, in lieu of worse, and that dairy cows had HAD to be healthy, had to be in top shape to reproduce, and give milk with any consistency, so no matter what, i had this feeling that basically this had been a healthy, albeit too young cow at that market. I was not going to let anyone say that to me, if i could help it.
Finally, finally, a whole night of waiting up with him on like his second or third day of his illness, every 2 hrs giving him something in his bottle like clockwork, I have him covered up cause he was shaking....I knew the sun was almost up, he was shaking, I figured it was at that point the decision was going to be made by him whether the shaking was it, or it was the start of his shaking off the hold that the scours had on him. I patted his head, put straw under him where i 'd been, and went to catch an hour or so of sleep. I parked myself on the sofa, i was too dirty to even take my clothes off to get in bed, and my husband woke me up in an hour and said that the cow was up. UP! YAY!
That was the beginning of his recovery, his from the scours and mine from the thought that he was something to sell. I knew that everyone else knew that's how it would end up, and tell you the truth, if it got too hard to keep him in this economy, I'd be forced probably to sell, but as long as I can, I will hold on to him, Cow. They said never name anything you're going to sell, but I figure if I changed it now, i'd jinx it and besides, he knows it. All of it.
Here's a pic of my son playing on his dirtpile, and the cow thinking that he could just waltz up there and play too. He never figured on there being a downside, just the up. He hung himself up like a teeter totter. I think its blurry from me laughing the whole time I was taking pics.
In the melange of animals to be sold, some were dropped off and the owners ran, and there were others that dropped their animals off an stayed,(us), giving water to animals who didn't even have a container in their cages (thats another story) but we spied a group of shaky newborn cows in a pen there. Oh, man, how does a newborn cow, still wet looking get there? I was mad at first but then realized that the dairy industry sells off males (no milk) and COULD do worse things than bring them to auction. I at least knew they needed colostrum and I've heard of other people buying them that were going to put them in the back yard to eat grass! (at 12 hrs old???) Well, long story short, we came home with one, an auction where the guy who bid on the entire group only wanted a few, and when all the other cows became availlable at a whopping $25 apiece, my husband said, RUN! I claimed the last one, and oh, man, it was the only one i'd seen laying down, not flat, up, but still. I was a little worried.
We knew a man from our home town, he volunteered to take it home for us, and we stopped at the SuperWalmart and got calf starter milk. Colostrum came the next day when I got to the real feed store. The cow probably weighed 90 lbs. He felt wet. He'd been born the day before, the tags on their ears had the dates they were born majic markered on. He was happy to hit dirt, as we set him down, he'd been on slippery cement up til that time, and in a cage an hour to my house was'nt much more comfy.
We then got some bad advice, on feeding. It was a half gallon bottle in the am and pm, but we did too much. we did more than that. I am not advising how much here, cause no matter what, I could be wrong still, but i do know that the hole we cut in the nipple on the bottle was way too big, and he would down a half gallon of milk in no time flat. It should take more time, their little stomachs are in transition, and it caused him, in two weeks to become gravely ill.
He had progressed from a wobbly calf to a stable calf, his eyes were all whites on top, like he was scared, when he came, but as time went by, he had normal whites, like us, but better eyelashes. He was happy and bouncy and energetic. But he soon got the raging diareahh. (sp) Too much food, too fast.
He got whats called the scours. I went to site after site trying to figure out what to do, I did find a lovely forum of cattle ranchers, who took me step by step with many stories of failure to reach calves in time, and warnings of like a 30% chance I'd be able to help him. (my computer crashed that had that site marked, I lost the link, sorry ) I'll put it up when i hack that old computer.
He's a steer, isnt he. sorry.
No, he is NOW. Then he was a , O HECK. i don't know. He got banded the second day I had him, it was painless and he never noticed. He sure was one sorry thing, tho, he got the kind of diarrhea that squirts out the back, not falls... and finally he just got tired, he coudlnt stand up. Too weak to stand.
I revved into action, electrolytes in the bottle, cut off the milk, he was like 2 or 3 weeks old, and had been starting to fill out nicely!!! I was determined to do everything i could to save him. My husband brought him outside the pen with all the other animals (goats, horse, burro,pig) and he built an impromtu tent over him, to keep the sun off. In that 2 or 3 weeks, he'd gained a lot of weight! We just kept replacing the hay i put under his butt, and i would drag him away just a bit, clean up and sit back down with him.
We did electrolytes, antibiotic shots, probiotics and meanwhile I'm running back and forth between him and the computer, I'd left so many messages on so many sites, one time I had a sick goat at 2 am, and only one person emailed me, and she's still my friend 3 yrs later, I knew there HAD to be advice out there. I made concoctions I probably shouldnt have, but as I watched him sink away from me, I got desparate.
Tea. I made LaPacho? tea, I had read that antifungal oral drugs were being considered as a means to retain water, a electrolyte enhancer, and as i had no access to oral antifungals, i considered wholistic. Thats where i got that idea. I was to give him Pepto Bismol. ak, and here's where I tell you not to listen to me, do not do this, i say, as its probably not legal. I gave the cow a lomotil. I am lactose intolerant, and if I didn't have a perscription of those in my purse, i'd of died myself, as milk is even in the hamburger buns at McD's and you don't know that til you are sick about an hour later. I put one in his electolye drink twice a day, til the 5 I had left ran out. I don't think you're supposed to give this to cows that might end up in the food supply, and altho i had seen dollar signs at first, now I was seeing a truly gentle soul, laying there sick with his head on my knee. I'm thinking, o, hell. I could have made such a quick buck on this.
I could hear the "well, what did you expect for 25 bucks?" in my head, and deep in my heart I was sure that the dairy had done the right thing by letting people have actual cows for cheap, in lieu of worse, and that dairy cows had HAD to be healthy, had to be in top shape to reproduce, and give milk with any consistency, so no matter what, i had this feeling that basically this had been a healthy, albeit too young cow at that market. I was not going to let anyone say that to me, if i could help it.
Finally, finally, a whole night of waiting up with him on like his second or third day of his illness, every 2 hrs giving him something in his bottle like clockwork, I have him covered up cause he was shaking....I knew the sun was almost up, he was shaking, I figured it was at that point the decision was going to be made by him whether the shaking was it, or it was the start of his shaking off the hold that the scours had on him. I patted his head, put straw under him where i 'd been, and went to catch an hour or so of sleep. I parked myself on the sofa, i was too dirty to even take my clothes off to get in bed, and my husband woke me up in an hour and said that the cow was up. UP! YAY!
That was the beginning of his recovery, his from the scours and mine from the thought that he was something to sell. I knew that everyone else knew that's how it would end up, and tell you the truth, if it got too hard to keep him in this economy, I'd be forced probably to sell, but as long as I can, I will hold on to him, Cow. They said never name anything you're going to sell, but I figure if I changed it now, i'd jinx it and besides, he knows it. All of it.
Here's a pic of my son playing on his dirtpile, and the cow thinking that he could just waltz up there and play too. He never figured on there being a downside, just the up. He hung himself up like a teeter totter. I think its blurry from me laughing the whole time I was taking pics.
