Life is a Perilous Venture

This morning one of our Murray Grey cows, Elizabeth, birthed a hundred pound bull calf. (Seventy-five pounds is considered a good weight for a new calf.) He was christened Erin. Unfortunately, after a few hours of life Erin still hadn't made it off the ground and as a result still hadn't tasted any nourishing colostrum.

Ellen and Nathan loaded Erin into the wheelbarrow and carted him over to the cow chute. They put his mom in the chute and started milking her by hand. She behaved very well considering the circumstances. Her colostrum came out thick and sticky, very similar to sweetened condensed milk.

Ellen and I tried to get some of it into Erin but any sucking that he did on the bottle was very half-hearted. He really wanted us to leave him alone so that he could sleep but that wasn't an option. Ellen would hold his head up with the bottle in it while I vigorously rubbed his gorgeous silver fur. After trying to convince him to suck the bottle for about half an hour Ellen finally gave up and decided to tube feed him.

Tube feeding is a last resort for a few reasons. First, you have a little better than a fifty-fifty chance of actually getting the tube down the right pipe so that you are siphoning milk into the stomach instead of the lungs. It is also important for a baby to get the chance to actually suck at first or they seem to lose the natural urge to do so.

In this case, it was a choice between forcing the colostrum into his stomach or watching him die of hunger. Thankfully, the tube did go into his stomach. When we left him he was finally holding his head up which we take as a good sign. Now we wait to see if the colostrum is enough to give him a will to live.

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Later in the day, Ellen noticed Erin trying to get up. His left hind leg seems bound up so that he has to balance on the other three. If you've ever seen a calf try to balance on four legs you can imagine how hard it must be to balance on three. We hope that his leg will relax and function normally.

We're encouraged that he's trying and try to feed him with the bottle again. He seems to finally be catching on to the idea that if he sucks the food comes faster.