Calving Times

We saw a cow being born on Thursday. Not an unusual thing on a farm with a herd of 80, yet in the couple of months that I'd worked there I'd managed to miss all the births.

We were actually out on site when the birth started, so got the call 'get back now!', which we did, an arrived as one foot was sticking out. On which note, a quick heads up: if you're eating, or generally squeamish, you might want to skip the rest of this.

Ready? Ok, so the usual sign that they're about to give birth is that they separate themselves from the rest of the herd. Then a 'bag', which is the amniotic sac, pops out and - ideally - bursts. If it doesn't. it's bad for the calf as they can suffocate. Which is why we were there.

So, next out is one foot followed, ideally, by the other. In a clean birth, both should be poking out together, followed by the mouth. In our case, it was the calf's tongue, wiggling round like a tentacle in a bizarre sight. At this point, we intervened, wrapping a length of rope around the calf's two feet and pulling outwards and downwards and assisting both the mother and gravity. Out came the calf, simple as, and, after a quick check over (a healthy and quite large male) we dipped the umbilical in iodine (Elise got that job and spent the rest of the day trying to wash it off her hands), packed the stuff away and the two ropes for sterilisation and left them to it.

And that was it, apart from all the cooing and taking pictures.

Bun Fight At The Ebblake Corral

Just to get everyone up to speed: I'm back home in Dorset and, yesterday, was back at my work placement at The Hedge Project. Manpower was needed as this was round up day. We have a herd of cows that are let out to graze on various sites, including Holt Heath, Sopley (near Hurn airport) and Ebblake, which is a patch of forestry commission land near Verwood.

The cows graze these patches and this has many ecological benefits if the correct amount of grazing is allowed (see http://www.wildlifetrusts.org/conservationgrazing). The trouble is that, with these sites a good few miles apart, the cows have to be transported there and back. This has to be done via a  trailer. Think of the smallest space that you could fit four cows into and you've got an idea of what the trailer involves. The trailer has to be small, and the cows crammed in for their own safety, basically. You can't put seatbelts on them but, if you're a cow, another cow crammed in right next to you works pretty well as an airbag in an emergency. Now, considering that it's hard enough persuading people to act in their own best interests, cows are not much different. They don't particularly want to go into the trailer and weigh over a tonne, which makes persuading them quite difficult. But then there's the fact that they all have to be rounded up in the first place.

Ebblake is a forestry commission site, as I mentioned, and as such is mostly pine forest, plus a marsh and some very thick scrubby new growth pine and birch. All in all a very primeval looking place, and not at all ideal for a cattle round up. In one corner was a gate, next to a corral, which is a pen specifically for putting cows into. The site itself was a large rectangle with a barbed wire fence surrounding it, and we could be pretty certain that they were inside that.

In fact, as we arrived, we could see them up a path in the distance and, when we were all ready to go, a rattle of a feed bucket and the round up call (basically 'yeeeeeeeeeeeeep') had the whole herd trotting towards us. I had been warned that the round up 'could take an hour, could take five hours' and, one time, took three weeks. Everything was just looking good for the 'one hour' end of this spectrum when one cow, a British White who appears to be the matriarch of the group, got spooked and ran off into the woods, taking most of the herd with her. Two had successfully been got into the corral and were standing there with a 'wait, what the hell's going on?' expression while the rest bolted.

Now cows are all about gentle persuasion. Especially these ones, which are easily spooked and so we had to locate where they'd got to and then for a line behind them, gently persuading them forward. Our team consisted of Dale (who's cows they were) Kayleigh, David, Callum, Mark (I think? sorry) and myself, all armed with 'cow persuasion sticks', or 1m lengths of blue pvc piping.

Now, persuading them forward was easier said then done. We located them on the far side of the scrubby bit of woodland and, with the fence at one end of our line, ushered them forward. You'd think that eight cows would be easy to locate in these circumstances but you'd be wrong. In the densest bit of the woods, you had to really move to keep them in site and, out of site of each other, we had to keep talking so the others would know what we were doing.

Long story short, everything got a bit complicated in there and I ended up tailing three cows, the British White and a Devon Red and her calf*, while the rest of the herd emerged ended up a few hundred metres to the left of me, luckily with most of the rest of our team tailing them. They seemed to be getting on just fine, with the cows on the path and heading towards the coral, so I continued tailing my cows as they meandered back through the woods.

The path that I mentioned ran in a sort of crescent shape from one gate to another, and the cows and I relocated each other by one of these gates. By now, the rest of the herd were in the corral and were not feeling particularly happy about it. The big British White that I had been following began bellowing back at them and then, taking the Devon Red and the calf with her, began ambling up the path towards them. At this point, I couldn't believe my luck. After all this effort and fumbling around in the undergrowth, they were just going to amble right up to where we want them.

And they did. I'd phoned ahead to warn as a four of the cows were being persuaded into the trailer. This had just been completed when my three turned up.  Then came the final, intensely nerve wracking, bit of getting the final three into the corral without either spooking them or loosing any of the others.

This was completed, the cows were loaded and delivered to our other site at Sopley, several miles away, where they were put out to pasture while we spent the rest of the day pulling ragwort.

There they wandered around, getting know their new pasture and eyeing us suspiciously as we passed.



*A joke based on the Northern Ireland accent: Three cows in a field, which one's on holiday? The one with the wee calf.

Gordo In The Lion's Den

Anyone remember the Sunday School story about Daniel in the lion's den? From memory (and we're talking along time ago when I heard this story) Daniel was a christian saint (possibly) who was in the desert (or somewhere) and happened upon a lion. Ok, I'm slightly wishing I hadn't started this now, as my memory of the story is shaky at best and I can't be bothered to research it.

So yeah, back up to the story: Daniel comes happens across a lion. The lion has a thorn in it's paw, which Daniel removes. Years later, Daniel is being fed to the lions in a Roman circus but it turns out that the lion that's sposed to eat him is the very same that he did the whole podiatry thing on all those years ago. The Lion does not eat Daniel.*

This story came to mind as I watched a vet remove a stone from a cow's hoof this week, which, involved getting this limping cow into a cow-sized aluminium cage called a cattle crush. These remind you of something you might find in a bondage club and are designed specifically so that cows can be examined close up without the cow or the person examining the cow being damaged by their panicking or kicking out. The cow has to be herded into a pen, then let through a gate in the pen, through a roughly cow's width corridor and to the end, where you crank a bar down behind their backside and a clamp around their neck. It's the cow sized equivalent to an arm lock and, from there, you open a panel to get to their feet. The affected foot had to be tied to a sort of cow-footstool, not only to prevent it from kicking the vet in the face  but to support it's weight as cows are heavy and don't sit very well on three legs.

The vet set too, washing the cow's hoof and then scraping the hoof with a special knife till she found the offending flint in the cow's hoof. All the while, the cow was not enjoying the experience at all. Which was understandable, as I wouldn't particularly like my foot being poked about if I had a massive splinter in it. Nor did the cow like the stuffing great anti-biotic injection that it got afterwards, with the vet having to make two attempts as the cow was thrashing about too much the first time.

To get back to my original point - and I'm very aware that the whole Daniel in the lion's den story is probably a bit made up - but still, really? Removing a thorn from a lion's paw? Really? Bearing in mind that a cow's main danger to you is it kicking you or squashing you and yet we had to shove this cow into a fairly major bit of iron mongery in order to get near it. And that's without any sharp claws or teeth or predatory instincts.

Anyhoo, the cow was released from the crush and sauntered back to the field, limping slightly less and making a recovery over the course of the rest of the day. Whether it remembers our kind treatment and will repay us I don't know. Again, I remain sceptical.

*My friend Lucy has since corrected me on the actual story of Daniel in the lion's den, which nothing like my version. I may be confusing it with a story about Christian martyrs told by an RE teacher. This all probably happened over 30 years ago.

Cows In The Rain