Babies!

My last few posts have been nothing but dismal and sad. So this time, I'm going to post something more upbeat.

Puppy and Twins and other calves I can’t forget.

There are very few calves that come through the calfhouse that I remember into their adulthood. I know them very well when I see them every day, but once they move up into the wean pen and then into the L group, I usually lose touch with who they are as individual animals- and that’s because there are currently more babies who need my attention.

But every once and awhile there will be one or two who stick in my mind forever.

151 is a great example, and that’s really only because she has lucked out and made it into any publication this farm ever had.

It all started back when she was only a few weeks old, the summer of 2004. A reporter for the local farm paper, Capital Press, was just driving around looking for filler stories and stopped by our place. He asked a few basic questions- How many cows do you have? How many do you milk? What breeds are they? And so on.

He then wanted to take some pictures and I told him we must go to the calfhouse because we have some red calves. Red is always a rare color on our farm and it’s somewhat exciting when we get one. It ended up being a moot point though; the picture came out in black and white anyway.

Well there she was: a tiny, bony little mix. Just the cutest thing you ever saw, back then she was the number 15, before she became a cow and was renumbered to 151. He then took some pictures of her sucking my fingers.

Flash forward a few years and now Darigold wants to take some photos for their coupon campaign. It was during the summer and we had all the dry cows in the field and everyone thought that would be the perfect backdrop.

And in the coupon you can see 151’s butt.

She was not only a camera magnet, but she is also a very long lived cow. She’s almost 9 at this time of writing and I hope she has 9 more in her.

***

Puppy was just another bull calf born in the field in the spring of 2012. But he was a bit different. He only topped out at thirty or so pounds at birth. We almost didn’t expect him to live.

But he had one thing going for him, he was a voracious eater. He would eat everything in sight and he had free reign of calfhouse-being that he was too small to fit any of collars.

He would follow my dad around like a little puppy dog wanting food. And that was how he came to the name Puppy.

We had to raise Puppy for a long while before he was big enough to sell, and he really didn’t grow much; except sideways.

In the end he went off to a nice family who needed an animal to graze their field.

Twins aren’t exactly rare, but are not too common either. We might get two or three sets of twins in a year. But what is exceptionally rare about them, is if we get two girls in a set.

If the dairy is to have a boy and girl set of twins, we can’t keep the female; because in all certainty she will grow up to be infertile. And to this day, I still don’t know why. I really must ask someone why that is so.

So, when we do get the rare occasion that we have a set of females, there’s usually a time when we name them.

I don’t know how many female twins the dairy has had in its lifetime, but I can think of three in the last five years, and that’s mainly because we have named them.

The first set we named was born about five years ago and they became the Bubblemint Twins- one was Pleasure and the other was Fun. They resided mainly in the Third Herd and did hang out quite a bit with each other.

The second set we had in the year 2010, and I remember this because of what I named them. In March of 2010, one of my all-time favorite directors came out with a new movie, Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland.” And now I bet you can see where this is going. I named the twins Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum.

And now, the year 2013, we have had another set of twin girls born. This time it was trickier to think of the right kind of names. I wanted it to be something I liked, maybe paying homage to something. It took me close to a week before I thought of a set of names. Being a huge Harry Potter fan, the names Flourish and Blotts just seemed so perfect. They are spunky little things and I think the names suit them quite well.

Then there are the calves that I remember not so fondly. Not because they got sick and died or anything, it’s mainly because-even for cow standards- are quite dumb and just test every patient bone in my body.

Most recently we decided to keep a bull calf, his name is Mike. But I couldn’t stand him. I had never seen an animal so slow in my life.

Drinking from the bottle was an issue for him because when he would release the nipple, he would seem to forget I was there with the rest of his meal and decide to wander about his stall or go socialize with the other calves instead.

I finally tried to get him on the bucket. Sometimes if a calf is not so good with the bottle, they can pick up the bucket quite quickly. A great calf can figure out the bucket immediately, a normal calf will take a few days to get it, the worst is a week. But Mike took three weeks. Three. He would tease me a lot too. There would be mornings where he would stick his head in and suck away. Then I would think,

“Yes, it has finally happened! He got it!”

But the afternoon would roll around and we would be stuck right back where we began, with him actually afraid of the bucket. And so starting over we would.

There is a very deliberate reason that I wrote Derpy Hooves on the back of his tag.