Innovative Farmers of Ohio

We lost a cow last Sunday though she was dispatched a week later. She prolapsed giving birth to a bull calf who stumbled away in the darkness and died as she relentlessly pushed beyond measure not knowing the calf had already been born. One of nature’s cruel side effects of animal pregnancies. Pigs, my husband says seem to inherit this tendency to prolapsed where the uterus comes out along with the babies or soon there after. Save no gilts from these litters he was warned.

The vet was called early Sunday morning. Being a weekend he charges double for emergencies. He told John that he could attend things as he walked him through what needed to be done. John called his mother who he said is better than 911 in her readiness. I was out of town. Then John called his younger brother Gabe to milk while he and his mother got the cow up and into the barn where they first gave her some calcium intravenously. Immediately the uterus shrunk to where it could then be cleaned with buckets of warm soapy water and rinsed.

Sleeved with a sterile glove, John pushed the mass back into the cow. However, it would not stay. So as he continued to hold it in with one hand, he called his older brother Rick who had a friend whose aunt worked in the ER. She had given him a throw-away staple gun still loaded. Could he come quickly with the device so the uterus could be secured inside the cow.

The staples worked. John then sewed her up with a large needle his mother had brought using fishing line. Huge doses of antibiotics and some banamine helped the cow fight the bacteria surely embedded in the uterus as she lay outside in that early rainy morning in the mud. The banamine soothed her pain.

She did alright even against predictions, ate fairly well, but toward the end of the week, she began tilting her head, hanging her ear to one side. Then she went down, her eyes rolling about, in great distress. John shot her. And buried her. He figured she had acquired a lethal ear infection or maybe it was listeria, always present in the earth itself. Who knows. He saved $500 no doubt in vet bills but lost the cow and calf. Sad business working and tending livestock, the operable word live, but it happens against everyone’s wishes though everyone, a long line of family and friends, tried to make it otherwise.