The Twins
Friendly and her twins!!
Friendly had twinsbut she was rejecting one of them. That was not good. A friend told us to put them in a small space and keep the Mom apart from them for a couple of hours. Here is the story of how we did all that and what ensued. Well we went out and got the rejected calf first. Of course that was a challenge! First we had to be sure we had Friendly’s calf and not one of the other cow’s calves. Massey, Cutie andTippy all have calves. We lassoed the rejected calf. (Pretty Funny). I stood there holding on to her while Gary checked out all of the other cows and their babies. Then we put the reject into the back of the Kabota. Gary laid on top of her to keep her from flopping out. He kept hollaring at me to not go too fast as to toss him out of the Kabota. LOL We got little Reject into the corral. Went back out to get Friendly and her little bull calf (henceforth called Lazy). He was asleep, as usual. Of course we had to convince Friendly to follow us. After we had her attention, we put Lazy into the back of the Kabota. She thought that was OK and started to walk off. S—! Of course we had Tippy’s attention also. I drove the Kub through the gate, stopped it, chased away Tippy and herded Friendly toward Lazy and the Kub. Gary got Lazy out of the Kub and was leading (dragging) him to getFriendly to follow. She followed through the gate. I shut the gate and took off in the Kub. Gary is laying on top of Lazy and Friendly is following. This time Gary is yelling “slower” and “faster”. It was intense. Well we got them all to the corral. We put the calves into the shed and locked them in there so Friendly could see them but not nurse. I think everyone took a nap; including Me! That was all around 2:30. About 4:30 we went down and let Reject out to see if Friendly would let her nurse. Nope! We decided to get the cow chute and lock Friendly in there so she could not kick or head butt little Reject off of her. Meanwhile I got to talk to the vet and ask him what he recommended. He said the chute was a good idea but to not separate the calves from the cow. We got Friendly into the chute and had both calves nursing. Phew!! They nursed for a while and then we got Friendly out and went to the house. My knees hurt all night!! Then this morning we got Friendly in the chute again and the kids nursed. Friendly is not kicking off Reject as badly as she was. The vet says it will all be better in a 2-3 days. Sure hope so. Also hope little Reject got some colostrum when she was born.
Comments are closed.