I caught a tiny patch of red and white out of the corner of my eye as I crossed the front yard after going to the mailbox. "Ohmigod!" I thought, and quickened my pace. "June's had her calf."
Indeed she had. Our prototypical dairy bovine, whom we have had for six years, had left us guessing for months. Was she, or wasn't she? June, named for her birth month, is enormous even when she isn't carrying a calf. I had seen her being bred what I thought had been nine months earlier in May, and here we were to the third week of the month of June, and still no calf. Granted, there were the usual signs - an increasingly distended udder; a slight discharge from her vulva; a noticeable pooch to one side - but, well, when you have an animal as big as June, you're never quite sure.
And then, here he was, the most adorable little red and white bull ever seen. I arrived just as he was standing for the first time. Still wet from his birth sac and maternal washing, Little Bit wobbled to his feet. And, then....our horse, Megan, sensing something foreign in the corral reared on her hind legs, and Little Bit collapsed. "Megan, NO!" I shouted, and looked for a way to get through the electric fence wires as quickly as I could. I ran to the house for a peppermint, Megan's favorite snack, the halter and lead, and hoped against hope to find a live calf when I got back to the pen.
Mama June was calm, but L.B. had not ventured up again. I was terrified.
Megan calmly followed me out of the corral, clearly put out with my admonishing her. And, now, I needed to know. Would we be putting this little one down, after so many weeks of anticipation, because he was injured?
I entered the corral and spoke soothingly to June. "You done good, girl," I told her, as I waited to see if her calf would get up again. I poked his backside a little, prodding him to see if he could stand. And he did! What a relief.
Flash backward 30 years ago, and picture a very skinny city girl whose idea of farming was couched in a laughable naivete. I had an intellectual's understanding of the food chain, but I pretty much thought that food came from the back of the grocery store. I read about farmers, saw heart-wrenching films depicting ranchers losing cattle to storms, disease and thieves. I read books about self-sacrificing people who gave up a life of ease to move west and make a life in a new and untried land. But for all the pathos and the realistic portrayals, nothing substitutes for genuine experience. Thirty years ago I would not have known what to do.
Last October, my husband was with our daughter to help her with her new baby while her husband was in Iraq (I had already been there for a few weeks myself). During his absence, I confronted two decisions about our livestock that I had never encountered before. We had a heifer due to calve, and I would be out of town for a few days. The neighbors whom we had asked to care for her were concerned about her condition, and to put them at ease, I called a vet. Following his examination, the vet told me, "She's carrying a pretty big calf. She's got a 40% chance of not making it. Do you want to take her to the slaughter house while she's still walking?" "No," I told him, "I'll bank on the 60%." It was a call I had to make, and fortunately it was the right one. She delivered a healthy bull calf.
Only a few days earlier, I had made a different call. We had an "alert downer," an animal that was alert but could not get up. He did not respond to antibiotics, and the consensus of the experts I consulted was that he probably would not make it without hundreds of dollars of care (and that would be no guarantee of restored health). Having only paid $200 for him, the decision was clear. It was the first time I had needed to put down in animal, and the sense of relief that the animal was no longer suffering was enormous.
People wonder how I can do these things - make these decisions that can seem so cold. I don't quite know how to describe it. On one side, I have to maintain a cool and reasoned head - after all, I'm running a business, and a business runs on dollars and cents, not emotions. On the other side, I have assumed responsibility for other lives, and they depend on me to do right by them. And in the final analysis, the best I can really do, is commit to doing what is best for the animal.
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