Douglasbrae came at half seven this morning. The driver was very understanding, quick, professional and friendly. She was skin and bones and had stopped eating altogether in the last couple of days, so I was glad to see her out of her misery, but so utterly heartbroken that we had to do this at all. I hate losing animals.
The driver mentioned there are a lot of cases of Johne's going on up in Caithness, almost double the usual. We had her blood and faeces tested for Johne's and they both came back negative so we are okay (for now).
We tried to organise a post mortem but Douglasbrae (the only knackers up north) won't take carcasses to the SRUC center in Inverness, they have to have a totally sterile lorry with no other bodies in it to do that and it just isn't economical for them or the farmer. We couldn't transport the body ourselves as you need a leak-proof stock trailer and various paperwork and we couldn't take her down live as that would have been a welfare issue. The vets would have charged us at least double what SRUC charges (£160+) so in the end we had to accept that we would never find out what it was that was wrong with her.
Judith had a lot of symptoms of Johne's but we ruled out that and a few other infectious diseases, after speaking to Animal Health and SRUC they think it was either a tumour or liver failure. One other dairy farmer I spoke to thought it may have been that she had a wire or something in one of her stomachs. My theory was that she had bad teeth brought on by stress of losing the calf in Feb, but when we checked before she went on the DB lorry her back teeth were okay, her front teeth were about to fall out.
There isn't one conclusion to Judith's story, no one thing that would have saved her, but we have had a steep learning curve, have learnt many lessons about keeping cows. Happy to say that the other three are still going strong though, Gunna is like a pig.
Topic: Our small herd! (Read 10394 times)
