Saturday 18 February 2012
Do you remember Milly, the cow that needed a caesarian in November 2010 (details are here)? She calved again on Thursday and this time everything went according to plan. She delivered a live and healthy female with just a little bit of help from Gordon, and is very much in love with it. She always was very maternal, going as far as ‘luring away’ calves that weren’t hers by putting herself between them and their mothers. Calves tend to follow legs we’ve decided so it doesn’t matter who owns the legs as long as they’re close to the side of their head. By bumping a calf in the head and then walking away it’s pretty easy to get them to follow even if the legs are human. Unfortunately despite the constant nudging and licking Milly gives her calf, the baby doesn’t understand the concept of feeding so once again we’ve resorted to the faithful teat-bucket full of Milly’s milk.
The second ‘hooray’ is because we’ve been cleared of our TB restriction after sixty days. The vet came during the week to re-test our inconclusive cow who was being kept in solitary confinement – which she absolutely hated – and this time she passed. Oddly enough, when she was first found to be inconclusive DEFRA accepted the news over the phone and the movement restriction began immediately. Now we’ve had the all-clear it could take “several weeks” for the paperwork to be finalised. Gordon was slightly irritated whilst on the phone with them to tell them the good news and wanted to know the reasoning behind such a delay. They weren’t able to give him an answer. We now have seven bull-calves waiting to be sold. One cow has had two calves on her since almost the beginning of the year so the sooner we’re able to sell them, the sooner she’ll be able to rejoin the herd.
