The Lord gives, and sometimes He takes away.

When you deal with livestock, you can't help but learn about the "birds and the bees", because if you don't get animals bred, then you can't make any advancements in herd size or profit or anything.

It's hard to say which is more exciting:  winning a purple ribbon or having a new calf born.  That's a tough one.

It's spring again and that is the ideal time for calving.  If you've got a March heifer, you can get more showing time out of her in the heifer classes before she is bred, has a calf of her own (hopefully a heifer) and has to move up into a cow class.

As exciting as calving is, it is also nerve-wracking.  What if it comes early?  What if the calf gets stuck and has to be pulled, and no one is there to help it?  The list of "what if"s goes on and on.

My friend's Guernsey aborted a fetus last year.  It was only about the size of a cat and it was missing part of its leg.  It just never developed those bones.

She bred her again and this time had to have a c-section.  It was a bull.  She decided to bottle feed it for awhile.  It died within the week.

Another friend had a Milking Shorthorn calve last night.  It was full term and perfectly formed, but in miniature.  It was too weak to stand or hold its head up.  They fed it and stayed up with it all night, but it just wasn't right, and it died.

The death of an animal can make you feel like a failure.  It can make you feel ashamed, like you did something wrong.  It isn't anyone's fault.  This thing happens in nature all the time.  I also lost my first heifer at six months due to digestive malformation.

The other kick in the pants is all the time and money invested in the lost animal.  You buy semen.  You pay for someone to artificially inseminate (A.I.) your animal.  You pay to have it fetal sexed.  You watch over it and care for it.  You fret through the weeks before calving.  You lose hours of sleep checking on her...and to wind up with nothing for your efforts...it's a very defeating feeling.

My family has been praying for months about my heifers and their calves-to-be.  We know how terribly wrong things can go.  We just pray that God protects them all and makes them perfect and healthy and strong.  I do what I'm supposed to, but the rest is in God's hands.

Continual Observation

The health of my animals is extremely important.  I have to look them over every day; watch them; look for signs of anything out of the ordinary in their appearance or their behavior.

The Local Show 2012

Every time they are mixed in with other animals from outside their world or hauled to another place or have contaminated brushes or clippers used on them, they are at risk for contamination, infection, or infestation.  Respiratory infections, warts of all shapes and sizes, lice, pink-eye, and ringworm are just a few of the things that you need to guard against.
A few minutes of carelessness on my part or on the part of others causes me (and others) weeks of extra work and the added expense of sprays, pastes, vaccines, you name it.

I have to spend extra time disinfecting everything.  I have to make sure I bleach my brushes before I use them again.  (You never know...someone could pick up your brush and use it on their own animal and return it to your box, and you would never know it was contaminated.)  You have to be careful.

Weather plays an important role, too.  When it's cold and rainy, my animals can develop a cough which must be treated.

When we do shows during hot weather, we have to use sunscreen on their light haired delicate parts and all over the places that the sun hits hardest.  They will sunburn, they will turn red, and HURT, and peel if they not protected.

This little Holstein isn't one of mine, but I've had the same thing happen before.
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