Jun 13, 2016 4 min read

I told you last week about how we lost a cow to illness and about our unfortunate mishap in trying to support her calf. (In case you missed it, we accidently separated the wrong calf from the field, angering that calf’s mother and doing nothing to help the correct baby. Read all about it in last week’s edition.)

We went back at it this week, calling all of the cows into a narrow strip of pasture that we call the runway. It has gates along all four sides of it, so that cows can be run into, or out of, it from nearly any paddock on the farm.

We matched calves to mothers and began shooing pairs back out. By process of elimination, we were able to run the correct calf into the barn. She was healthy, although a little thinner than we would like. Still, we decided we would require the assistance of the head chute to hold her while we tried to give her milk.

The head chute is a contraption that holds a cow who requires treatment but won’t stand still for it. Ours has doors that close against the cow’s shoulders when it tries to walk through the opening. Once the doors are closed, the cow cannot walk forward, and its jawbone prevents it from escaping backward, as well. It does not hurt the animal in any way, but allows a farmer or veterinarian to approach the animal to administer injections, medications, provide birth assistance or offer a number of other treatments.

In this case, it was a bottle of milk.

Teaching a calf to bottle-feed is exhausting. Even at only a few hours old, calves are often incredibly strong. They balk at the idea of having a bottle shoved into their mouths and can twist, turn and shake off just about every effort to help them. My strategy is to back them into a corner, hold an arm around their shoulders, using the same hand to support their head, while balancing the half gallon of warm milk in the other hand. It sounds easier than it is, and they only weigh 60 to 100 pounds then.

At three months of age and weighing several hundred pounds, there was no way I could do this with her. So we put her in the chute, which left me to hold her head up and hold the bottle.

Still, she balked.

After 10 minutes or so of wrestling, we decided that we might take her water pail and leave the milk in its place overnight. I dumped the milk in a bucket and prepared to release her from the chute.

Before I got the door open, she had stuck her head into the bucket and began to drink. In approximately 30 seconds, she had slurped down the full quantity of milk and licked the bucket dry.

The next morning, we placed the bucket into her pen and poured the milk into it while she watched. She slowly picked her way across the barn to the bucket and again drank it in under a minute. Four times that day, I took milk in a bucket out to her, and all four times she came and drank it. By the last time, she was even letting me scratch her neck and ears while she drank.

Now she is turned out with our horse and a young bull who share the barn. She comes at the sight of the bucket (so do they – trying to keep two extra heads out of the bucket could be its own column) and is doing well. Hopefully, she will continue to thrive and we’ll be able to keep her for the next decade or so.

Laura Zoeller can be reached at zoeller5@verizon.net.