Recently we purchased some cows from our friends the Joannides. The cows are living at their house until we can take care of them. At the time, six of the cows were pregnant. When one of the cows started to go into labour there was some problems. The cow was having an extremely difficult birth with its first calf. When the calf was born after much praying, it was very healthy. When we heard the calf had been born safely, Dad, Davy and I all headed out to see if there was anything we could help with and to see the little calf. The calf was a female and I named it Fuzz. When we arrived we were met by Mr. Joannides and we followed him to the birth site, where I first laid eyes on the little, wet, adorable calf. The reason the calf was wet was because the mother had not cleaned its calf after it had been born and it would have been dryer and not so slimy. Most mothers take care of and feed their calves immediately after they are born, but because of this cow's difficult birth it had unhappily rejected this calf. And it refused to feed the calf. To continue the calves's life foster mothering was required. We needed to feed the calf approximately every two hours on a bottle of milk. Shortly after we arrived Mrs. Joannides came with a bottle of warm milk for the calf. She tried to feed it but it refused to drink. I asked if I could try to do it and to my immense surprise, she said, "Yes." With gladness I tried my hand at the job. It took a while but after a minute or so the calf was sucking the milk with me assisting her. At about midnight we noticed something protruding from the cow's rear end, I asked if it was the placenta but they told me it was a prolapsed vagina (sorry, but that's what it was!) which is when one of a cow's reproductive organs comes out of the cow's body inside out. YUCK! But luckily when the cow stood up it slipped back in. We all breathed a sigh of intense relief. Raccoons were a danger to newborn calves so they had to be protected either by a dog or a twelve- year-old with a pitchfork. Since Kody was not available I was the next best thing. I listened to raccoons clanking around in the barn hunting for stuff for a moment, then it was very quiet for about half an hour. After a little longer Dad took a shift for guard duty while I slept. Or at least tried to sleep, because that night was like sleeping in a torture chamber while being tortured. Sleeping that night was hard because of three main things. Stuffy air, Crampedness, (if that is a word), and mosquito's (there were tons of the little evil things biting me all night). In the early hours of dawn we woke up to a little cute slimy calf who was not one bit interested in drinking. And he wanted to be licked; it was very sad, she'd rub her head on your pants or your boots as a substitute for being licked. And when I looked at the mother cow it was not a pretty sight indeed. What we saw we guessed again might be the placenta turned out to be wrong again. It was a prolapsed uterus. When I woke from a short window of sleep I saw sunlight streaming through the windows and I was thankful to God for bringing me through that awful night. I took a look at the mother and it didn't look too good. When Mrs. Joannides saw it she told us it was the uterus and said it could be very bad for the cow, so the vet was called and he arrived quickly. When he got there he took a good long look at the cow and without any questions whatsoever said we need two buckets of clean water. When he had that he went to the work cleaning the uterus and vagina which were both prolapsed. He kept bathing them with a mixture of iodine and water to protect them from any infection that might be on it. After he was done cleaning them he stuffed them into the cow and inserted a large pin to hold it in place until it healed then he bound it up and we moved the cow and calf to the shade, gave the mother some shots and a little later we headed home so I could write this story of my first day of farm life.
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| The little wet calf. |
The sleepy little wet calf.
Washing the organs.
The tail had to be held out of the way!
Pushing it back in.
Feeding the sleepy, wet, hungry little calf.
