As you can guess from the title, it was a hellish, horrible night last night. After milking we have started bringing the new imports into the parlour for food, so they can get used to our system before calving. Well last night I went to bring them in and noticed that one was missing. May I just say before I tell the rest of the sad tale..... she was a present from the farmer in Italy, he especially sold her to us as we have bought quite a few animals from him. She was in calf to embryo transfer of a world class italian milking bull, and one of his best animals, so we were really looking forward to a bull calf so that he could really improve the herd even further with milk yield/genetics etc. As it turns out she was starting to calve, so I caled the lads (seeing it was a rather cold night we didn't want to risk anything) so we brought her down, she was a bit of a hassle not wanting to come and stuff, but she came and we popped her into a building with fresh bedding. Half an hour later we looked in on her and only the head was presented, we didn't like that so we got her into the crush. My elder brother, is an excellent lamber and calver I might add and missed his true calling to be a vet, he gently put his hand inside of her to feel for the legs, he managed to get one leg out, but the other one was pushing very hard into her backend, he had to manouvere it so that she wouldn't rip inside, which is what would have happened had she pushed once more. We hardly had to pull the calf, as she pushed it out herself very quickly. We got the calf onto the ground, but it seemed almost lifeless, it was then we realised that it had a huge amount of stuff on the lungs, so we picked it up to swing it, which helped a little, then there was still loads of stuff on its lungs, so we held it upside down and shook it up and down, not very hardely but enough for stuff to empty from its lungs, the lads held it up down and I massaged it lungs hardely to force the stuff out. We did this a few times, after resting the calf a little inbetween each session, my brother did mouth to mouth, inhaling fresh air all the time. The sad tale ends here, the calf had way too much stuff on his lungs and didn't have the strength to help himself, along with us trying to revive him, he died shortly after and I must admit many a tear was shed last night by me, mum had her head in her hands and dad was almost speechless with anger..... My elder brother was upset and annoyed, my younger brotherwas very depressed and had to have a long talk with a long distance friend to help get stuff in perspective. So all in all calving has gotten off to a terrible start, I am only thankful we never had a ripped mother to boot, so that is some comfort I suppose. The calf drowned in his mothers womb and there was nothing we could do about it, he just didn't have the fight left in him, he wasn't premature he was due, it just happens I suppose
Still to look on positives here we do have more calvers coming up from the same batch and they have not as good genetics as this one, but very good anyway, so maybe we will get a bull out of one of them. Sorry for the gloomy tale, but i felt I had to let it go somewhere..... Thanks for listening i really do appreciate it
Topic: Hellish night :( (Read 5648 times)
