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Yep, we started calving last week, and this guy was one of the first to hit the ground. I took this picture Saturday. On Sunday, it snowed, which meant the end of roping practice, because the indoor arena has now become a maternity ward.
Converting from one kind of playpen to another takes a few steps. First, we drag the dirt in the arena flat and pack it with the tractor wheels so there's as little dust as possible. Then we haul in big round bales of straw, cut them open and spread them around for bedding. We put all of the roping dummies, tack and the little putt-putt arena tractor safely behind steel stock panels where the cows can't reach them. Then we patrol the whole building for anything they might chew on, taking into account the long list of things a cow considers edible, including leather straps, ropes (old-fashioned hemp, hard-twisted nylon and new-fangled bungee cords are equally delectable), plastic baling twine, bones, chunks of rusty barbed wire, batteries, electrical wiring, engine oil and anti-freeze.
Oh, yeah. And farm fertilizer. They love that stuff. A bunch of 'em chewed the gate rope off our lease pasture day before yesterday to get into the neighbor's yard, where one managed to commit suicide via nitrate poisoning.
And you think you eat stuff that's bad for you.
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8 comments:
I kinda guessed what calving is, but still went to Google where I skimmed all the messy birthing details. I wonder if there is anything this fascinating in my life. :) Probably not.
Anita: There's something fascinating in everyone's life, when seen by someone from an entirely different background. I am constantly amazed that any of you think this stuff is all that interesting. Me, I would love to go visit a normal New York City apartment and spend a day living the life of an urbanite, just to see what it's like.
Excellent.
Dad put out salt (which they loved) and mineral (which they barely touched) blocks, but the milk cows still chewed big chunks out of the wooden mangers. “It’s the nature of the beast,” he said.
The little ones are so cute.
Cows will and do eat anything. My son works at a dairy and one of their big tractors broke down. By the time they'd called him and he got there, the cows had licked part of the paint off and eaten the cords for the GPS system on the back. Suicide by nitrogen poisoning. Great.
What a cutie! And yes, we are fascinated by lives different from our own. Let's face it, a lot of firemen don't understand our fascination with them!
Stephanie: *sigh* Couldn't begin to tell you how many grain auger belts we've lost to the damn cows.
We'll add these opposite experiences to our bucket lists. :)
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