Thursday, January 13, 2011

Patches for a calf


My uncle owns a dairy frm and one day he called our phone number. He said he had a hurt calf. The little cow was some sort of dairy cow of course, so it was huge! He told us it had a broken leg that could not be fixed and that she would never make a good dairy cow because of it. It needed a home where it could just be a pet. So all in all, we chose to give the calf a home on our farm. We drove to his dairy farm and the kids loved seeing how everything worked. His cows were huge and I might have been having second thought until I saw her. She was about 3 feet tall and two weeks old. We listend carefully to the instructions for bottle feeding it. We had pretty much everything already. (After a long trip to Tractor Supply Co.) We had worked on the barn for awhile before we drove here. After giving it a door some soft hay and a bucket of water and feed if she wanted to try it, it actually looked really nice.
Loading her up was obviously not to easy. We had cram her into Daisy's dog crate, which turned out to fit her quite well. She didn't "Moo!" to much until we got onto our dirt road. I guess the bumps can be annoying if your in a dog crate and your back is touching the roof. When we put her in the barn she seemed very comfortable. We were afraid she wouldn't like and get all crazy, butting her feet in the air. Actually she did kick her feet in the air, but it looked like she was enjoying it. The kids heated up a bottle and fed it to her. That little calf could drink about a gallon of milk, even more if we let her. After a few days the kids started whinning about feeding her. At first they would fight over who did it now, it is the opposite. I guess the cold fianlly got to them. We named her Patches and her foot is looking a lot better.