This weekend wasn't the greatest on the ranch. We lost a calf, had to put a calf down, and had to put a mother cow down as well.
The calf that died was born disfigured. The little thing only had one nostril and it's lip was detached on the right side of it's face. He was born one evening and didn't survive to see morning. I felt so bad for it. Honestly, I couldn't believe it was alive when it was born. Just one of those strange things, ya know?
The calf we had to put down has been something weighing on our minds for a long time. He was the cutest dang Charolais calf you'd ever see in your life. Unfortunately, after he was born he contracted navel ill, which then turned into joint ill. What causes navel and joint ill is bacteria enters the belly button of a newborn calf. Once the bacteria reaches the joints of the calf it causes joint problems, trouble walking, and pain. It will eventually get so bad that the calf's joints will basically wither away until he can't walk at all. We first noticed he probably had joint ill when he was about a week old. Everyone basically knew that if the bacteria was already to his joints, he would probably have to be put out of his misery. We did try to save him though. He was administered a sulfur bulos twice a week and a high-dose shot of LA 200 every 3 days for 2 weeks, as instructed by our veterinarian. We thought we had caught the joint ill in time, because the calf responded well to the treatment at first. But after a while he would be barely walking again. Finally, after weeks of trying to save him, he had to be put down. I think the worst part was that his mother is one of the most attentive cows we have in our herd. She rarely left her calf's side. I know that we had all grown fond of the little guy, so putting him down wasn't easy for anyone. After that we made sure that every single calf born on the place had it's belly button coated with iodine, that being the way to avoid navel and joint ill. We learned a pretty hard lesson with that.
The cow that had to be put down was actually one of the heifers we bought this year. She calved sometime early last week. After a couple days she started to act funny. She was down a lot, so my brothers and I went out to get her up and see if we could do anything. When we walked out to see what was going on, she could barely stand up. We brought her into the barn and put her in the head catch. Sometimes when cows do this they could have a twin inside them or maybe even a blood cloth. My brother stuck his hand inside her to see if that was the problem, but it wasn't. We gave her a dose of LA 200 to see if it would put a little hitch in her giddyup. It didn't. She just kept going down, and we could not get her to stay up. This is one of the worst things to see, especially in a heifer. Basically, if the cow doesn't even have the will to stand up, she is going to be dead within a few days. We humanely ended her life, the third animal to die on the ranch within a few days.
It's weeks like this that I wish I had a normal life where I didn't have to deal with death on a regular basis. But as the saying goes, "Where you have livestock, you have dead stock."
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