Saturday, January 14, 2012

Pullin A Dead Calf

Well....today i slept till noon, because my allergies have been horrible lately and I've been taking Robitussin Congestion night time :) anyways, as i woke up, Grant came home from the barn, and came into the bedroom. He proceeded to give me hell of course for sleeping so late, and then he said "there's a cow in the pasture that's got a dead calf we need to pull." i was still half asleep and said oh lord ok. so Grant went to bring her up out of the pasture and then we loaded her up into the trailer and brought her to some other working yards near the house. We left her there for the afternoon because we had 2 more horses at the barn that needed to be worked on cows, and she just needed to lay down and rest.

We returned home from the barn, and it was time to get to work because we had little daylight left! We headed out to the working yards and were ready to get it done. we finally got her into the shoot (well half way at least). she was not a happy momma. Just 2 hooves and the nose were out of the cow. Grant hooked up the chain around the calves feet and started pulling. Momma started groaning and trying to push but this baby was not budging. So we had to hook up this old school rig that hooks a cable to the chain and has a handle that you crank and it cranks alright. The calf came out a liiiiiitle more but got stuck in the mommas hips. At this point, DL had arrived and we another set of hands. Both guys were pulling on the chain and this baby was not moving at all. At this point, we decided we needed to let her out of the shoot so she could lay down because at this point the calf was hangin out halfway and stuck. She wobbled on over to the water trough and then layed down. Grant went and layed on her and she got up and fought. A couple minutes later, she was back down. Grant layed back on her, and she had nothing left in her to fight. DL hooked up the crank. After a long while of cranking, the baby finally budged a little more. Usually dead calves that are stuck are not this difficult. He was stuck so bad that all the pulling tore one of its legs loose :( We didnt want to cut the baby out though. So after one more long hard pull, out the baby came. it was a biiiiiiiiiig baby. Momma just layed there making a pitiful moaning noise. All 3 of us, just stepped back and stood there for about 10 minutes in silence just staring. All the "having a baby juices" as i call them, were gushing out, and there was a loooooot of it. We kinda propped the momma up, but then just left her. We left the baby as well, because she needed a reason to get up. If you leave the baby, she will get up (if not paralysed) to clean the baby, even though its dead. Other wise she will just lay there and die. We will check on her in the morning and see if she survived. I now will add another calf to my dead animal list........
this was fun getting the truck and trailer through
this is how we found her
almost out, but this is when it got realllllyyyy stuck
grant laughing when after i said, shit i hope yall dont ever hafta do this to me lol
this is when i get in trouble for videoing and not focusing lol

last pull before she came out