A field C-Section and putting down cows!
Well, our first few months of owning cows has been a bit of a wild adventure. We have been visiting the local sale barn just shopping for low input cost cows and evaluating how different animals sell at sale barns.
I ended up purchasing an older longhorn cow that was 8+ months bred really hoping that her general health and body condition might improve once she got more food and some fresh air in her diet.... Well... I was wrong. About two weeks after we purchased her, my sister found her down by one of our ponds. Even with assistance, she couldn't get up and stay up. We tried all assortment of things to get her up and to force her into labor, so she didn't lose her calf, but we were unsuccessful.
We decided the only real option was to put the cow down and perform a C-Section to try and save the calf. After doing some reading and watching a video on Youtube, we managed to get the calf out ALIVE! "Peaches" went home with my sister to get colostrum and stay with her for a few days. Peaches the premature/c-section calf is now the photo prop and pet of the entire extended family as she lives with my parents on their property.
Maybe the wildest thing about performing our own field C-Section, getting the calf out alive, and putting a cow down... is Lance and I had to put a different heifer down just a few days before that!
A little bit of backstory: the property already had a function pen with an alley built to work cattle, but we really needed a headgate, head-catch, or squeeze-shoot to safely be able to work the cows. That led us to Facebook marketplace to try and find a decent headgate without breaking the bank. We found a good headgate, but it was going to be a drive to get it.
It just so happened to work out that someone was selling an Aberdeen Angus bull and someone else was selling a pair of Dexter/Aberdeen heifers along our route, so we went to get a headgate, two heifers, and a bull.
Everything went smoothly until the last stop on our journey when we stopped to get the two heifers. We quickly discovered they were VERY skittish and had not been worked or socialized much. The smaller of the two sprinted past us and leaped as hard as she could into the solid steel fence.
She hit the fence and went completely ridged. At first, we thought she had knocked herself out, but as we got closer, it became very apparent she broke her neck when she hit the fence. The poor farmer had no idea what to do so we helped him put her down, drag her to the barn, and hang her from a rafter to drain before he processed her.
Not what we expected out of the trip, but raising cattle has been full of wild adventures and we're really just getting started.
More Later,
~ Mitchell
Peaches provides lots of happiness to my wife and grandchildren. My children that are still at home are a little jealous of the time my wife spends with Peaches. She is drinking over a gallon a feeding and starting to graze on grass and socialize with the other livestock. However, she still thinks my wife is her mom and my two LGDs are her herd. DAD