May 24

Wow. Hot day today. It reached 90º this afternoon, and the humidity is awful. Luckily, when I am done with this post I can escape to my nice cool 56º room.

Alert to the squeamish, some vet services were provided today. Feel free to skip down 4 paragraphs.

The vet came out today. No one is sick, but there were some, ah, maintenance things to get caught up on. The year-old calves were still, um... "intact" and that was taken care of today. It's much easier when they are younger. The baby calves we just got a few weeks ago have been taken care of simply by H's dad a week ago or so. There's a special rubber band-like device that is put on them and restricts blood flow until the offending organ shrivels up. At that point, they hardly even notice it. But, with the bigger guys, the task just never made it to the top of the to do list last year. It's similar to dogs, they can get much more aggressive and even territorial with all that testosterone pumping through them.

The baby calves were "disbudded" today, too. As they get older and bigger, if their horns are allowed to grow, they can cause a lot of damage, to each other and to anyone trying to handle them (moving them from point A to point B for whatever reason). So, it is very common to use a Disbudding Iron to burn the "budding" horn so it won't grow.

I wanted to be brave and witness these events. When they started with the bigger boys, I had to leave for a while. But, there was really only a moment of "complaint" from them. Then, they were just pissed off because they were being confined. Four hundred pounds of pissed off cow (and these bigger ones still have their horns) can be bad. All was fine, though. I came back into the barn about 1/2 way through the first one, but I stayed where I couldn't actually see what they were doing! The babies seemed to not feel much either. They, too just didn't like being held. We also had some natural anesthetic for them that relaxed them quite a bit. Within a half hour the anesthetic had worn off, and they seemed just like they've always been.

Next on the list for today was weeding some more of the carrots. We limited it to one row today. After lunch, we planted some and weeded some, but called it an early day with the heat.

A shower and a nice dinner, and I'm feeling quite human again!