Nebrasksa trip - Doctoring calves

This is a series of my impressions of our trip last week to visit Nancy, Rex and Pat on their ranch/farm in Nebraska

Doctoring cows - they have livestock in three separate meadows, all leased. None of the meadows are close to each other, but nothing in Nebraska is close to anything.  They check on the calves at least every third day and while we were there, during the checks they found some sick calves.  Usually they drive the 4-wheeler the 15 miles to the meadow, but since we were with them, they drove the truck.  Nancy showed us how to determine if a calf is sick.  Look at their eyes to make sure they are alert, look for mucus coming out of their noses, plus she probably looks at 1000 more things.  These were the two I could identify.  Since she has done this forever, she has a keen sense of the calves and their health.  All the calves and mothers have a tag in their ear, so we took note of the numbers of the sick ones.

We returned to the house and picked up the horse trailer, with 2 saddled horses.  They have developed a very efficient way to doctor the sick calves.  They park the horse trailer near a fence, and set up a corral to contain the mother and calf.   Once this is set up, Nancy and Rex set off to bring back the first pair.  Rod is very very very disappointed that I did not get a picture of him rounding up cows the second day.  They brought back 3 pairs, and Rod and his horse Doc were part of that roundup.

The mother ends of in the horse trailer and the calf is in a little pen.  In about 5 minutes they give them two injections, take their temperature and on to the next pair.  Their feeling is this is less stress on the calves. In our time there we doctored two meadows of calves for a total of 6 calves.  A rancher gets to know her/his cows very well to know whether they are OK or not, and to know when they needed doctoring.  There was lots of discussion about vaccinations, and whether they should have vaccinated them earlier to prevent these ones from getting sick.

The process seems to be continually improved.  They acknowledged that they are not Cowboys, like Nancy's brothers and nephews, but this system of doctoring calves works very well for them, and it did seem like very little stress on the calves.