I'm Too Sexy For My Shirt

A couple of posts ago, I mentioned the mnemonic "He's right so she left." This is a guide for which ear the calves get tagged.

Thumper, an adorable white-faced calf born just a couple of days ago, was tagged in the right ear. The sex call of male was made by the student worker who got to name this calf.

Unfortunately for Thumper, for the OSU beef cow farm, and for the PIs of this project, Thumper is a lovely, little bitty heifer. (The supervisors are happy about this; it means that OSU will keep her, and she really is super adorable. Male calves have their testicles banded at 3 or 4 days of age and are eventually sold for meat.)

What a wake-up call. Not a single supervisor thought that we had to double check the sex calls made by the students.

The student misidentified the sex of this calf, and as a result, the calf had a big hole punched in her right ear for no purpose at all, because the beef cow farm manager was rather annoyed once this error was discovered and insisted that the calf be retagged in the other, that is, the correct, ear. 

The instructor of the calving class was horrified. She had no idea that the students were so inexperienced that they couldn't even be trusted to sex calves at birth.

There are plenty of mammals that lack external genitalia at birth. And some species don't express secondary sexual characteristics until puberty. For example, sexing felines at birth is a bit of an arcane art. But cows, like us primates, have external genitalia at birth. Female calves have tiny vulvas and male calves have scrotums. And most mammals of course have umbilical cords. There is a small swelling on the belly of newborn calves where the cord was attached that persists for several days. Despite this, the presence or absence of a scrotum is a nearly fool-proof indicator of sex in a newborn calf.

We think the student thought the umbilical was either a penis or the scrotum. We are not sure how this student could think this since all the calves have a thin, dangly, ragged red tube of slowly atrophying flesh hanging from that umbilical connection. Newborn bulls don't have an external penis. This is one of those things that develop at puberty.

Of course, as a result of this hysterical kerfuffle, I had to take pictures of newborn calf genitalia on my shift at the barn this morning.

Can you guess the sex?

Oh, look! No scrotum. It's a girl!

Can you guess the sex?

Oops! Scrotum! Sorry, it's a boy.

Climbing into pens and splaying open the hind legs of sleepy calves is not for the faint of heart. On one of our attempts to get a good picture of male genitalia, the calf suddenly kicked out. One of its hind hooves make a direct hit on my phone. The phone went flying up into the air, inevitably landing face down deep in cow shit. I cleaned it up, wiping most of it off on my pants, the rest on paper towels, but it still has a very faint odor of cow shit about it. Or maybe that's just me. At this point, I am not being too particular. Fortunately, I live with dogs and they are not at all particular either.

Because of the low light in the barn at night, there is a slight delay from when I push the button and when the shutter flashes open. The camera took a nice photo of the cow shit that it subsequently landed in.

And although this has nothing to do with the theme of this post, I would just note that in a personal best record, I dead-lifted a 94.3-pound calf from the ground to several feet off the ground so we could hitch the sling holding it to the scale and get its birth weight. He is, by several pounds, the largest calf born so far. The calf has to be clipped to the chain high enough so that its feet don't touch the ground so we can get an accurate weight. The student working with me could not himself had weighed over 100 pounds. So I told him, I'll lift, you clip the sling to the chain. It took us two tries to get this calf high enough that his feet weren't dragging on the ground. After we returned Alfalfa to his pen (the name chosen by the student), I said, we will not be weighing any more calves tonight. Weighing that calf nearly did both of us in.