Saturday, February 14, 2015

Calf Rodeo

The pregnant beef cow study continues. I don't have a theme for this post, just some random thoughts.

In case you were wondering how I can manage a 2-6am shift every day (that's 7 days a week), I shifted my sleep schedule. I go to bed at 6pm, get up at 1am.

I've suffered from insomnia for many years. But for the past three weeks, I've been so mentally and physically exhausted by all the extra work that I can barely manage to turn out the light before I'm asleep, and I don't move until the alarm goes off. I feel reasonably rested during the day, and I'm certainly getting more hours of sleep than I normally do. But this schedule still doesn't feel quite right. I love walking up and down the barn in the dead hours of the morning, listening to the cows breathing. Still, I'll be glad when I can resume normal programming.

Not all supervisors have equal skill sets. One of them, who is in fact a PI for the project, has been extremely reluctant to touch the cows or calves, and he refuses to do blood draws on the calves. Since each calf gets poked five times (0, 12, 24, 36, and 48 hours from birth), that's a problem. He's taken to calling me, no matter what time of day (he never takes night supervisor shifts, thankfully), to come in and do the blood draws that fall during his shifts. He and the primary PI are feuding so he won't call her, and I sure don't like being in the middle of that. But I look at it this way: it's just more experience for me. Sure, it's inconvenient. And sometimes he calls me when I am not at my best. But I view it as a real-life challenge: veterinary medicine means working with animals and they don't give a toss for our arbitrary schedules, so I need to be able to think, act, and make decisions even when I'm tired. So when he calls, I change into my barn clothes, drive in, do the blood draw, hop back in the car and go home.

Calf rodeo. All three student helpers weren't needed to hold this calf down; in this position, only one holder is needed. But I thought it would make a funny photo. "Indulge me," I told them.

Cows have some interesting social dynamics. A new mother will lick the neck of another pregnant cow in her pen, exchanging pheromones it is thought, and that second cow will generally go into labor within a couple of days. Pregnant cows sometimes try to steal newborn calves from other cows. Sheep do this too. And if you move a bonded group of cows to a new pen, they will challenge the cows in the neighboring pens, slamming their heads into the gates and generally making a lot of drama.

New mothers can be amazingly aggressive! Five of the 45 pregnant cows were range cows from east Oregon, newly purchased by the OSU farm this year, and they are not used to people. They were fucking frightening to deal with after they had their calves. I called them Crazed Beast 1, 2, etc. Sure, cows don't have claws or flesh-tearing teeth (they do have teeth), but they kick as fast as lightening and they will charge you, ram you with their head, stomp on you if you are on the ground. When you stand in front of a pen and the new mother lowers her head, stiffens her legs, and gives you the stinkeye, you know you need to be careful when you pull that calf out to get some blood and a weight. I could write a book about what I've learned about how to move around cows and about what I've learned about how to move cows around. 

Also interesting is what I call the "dead calf" mode. The calves generally struggle a bit when you hold them for blood draws but if there are delays (veins blown or hard to find, for example), they usually drop into this weird state with eyes rolled back and bodies completely limp. I suppose it is an evolutionary adaption for protection against predators. I still laugh every time it happens. 

My tolerance for dirt and stink was greatly expanded when I started living with dogs. But now that I've been spending time with ruminants, I only notice the most egregious fluids (the first poop that newborn calves make is nuclear yellow and unbelievably smelly; I generally clean that off right away). Even so, I always wash my hands and arms carefully when I get home, and I take my barn clothes off right by the door and store them away from the dogs (I wear the same clothes for several days in a row). I keep my boots in the war room at the barn. Lice and such tend to be species-specific but there is no need to be stupid about things.

Besides regular blood draws, we have to weigh the calves a lot. We crab-walk them from their pens to the scale and snap the sling onto them--it has extra straps that go around their chest and butt to keep them from tipping out. Then we have to lift them high enough to clip the sling onto the chain. It is attached to an S-shaped piece of metal with electronic sensors on it that measure the separation of the top and bottom of the S; this electrical signal is converted to pounds by an electronic display.

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