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| Update on the calf in this thread: http://talk.newagtalk.com/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=631638&start=1...
After running this by some vets one of the university doctors was fairly confident that it was the classic appearance of a calf born to a cow that had ingested poison hemlock during mid gestation. Supposedly cows usually don't graze the plant but may if grass is short at the time. It affects the development of the calf based on the stage of gestation so if ingested 40-50 days into gestation the calf could have a cleft palate and crooked legs usually happen after 50 days. We've never seen the plant in our pastures but we do have a lot of ditches and creeks that are hard to access other than by foot it's possible it could be somewhere not in plain sight. It's an annual plant so we'll keep an eye out for it while checking pastures but it's possible it is not present now.
We decided to cut our losses with the calf by weaning him off the cow and gave him to the neighbor down the road who has a couple bottle calves so they will feed him with them and decide what they will do with him. At this point we really didn't want to keep the cow and calf up at the barn this summer where we could keep better watch of the calf and it means more to us to get the cow bred back than have to deal with a special situation like this where we'd have to mess with keeping a couple more cows up so we could detect heat and diligent in detecting heat to AI them than just having the bull do his job. He said it's very unlikely the calf will come out of it and obviously would not be able to support the weight of a finished yearling slaughter calf so the best case scenario was he might be able to get up to a weight for lean barbeque or hamburger or euthanize him now because he likely will not be able to live a healthy and normal life as he grows. | |
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Update on Calf
