Meet Baby Girl

Meet Baby Girl. Or as my son has named her, One Eyed Betty. Here’s her story.

One early morning in July, my Farmer was out changing irrigation pipe in the pasture and came across a new born calf. No momma cow around anywhere. My Farmer wondered if maybe it was a twin and the momma had walked away with the other calf, forgetting about this one. Whatever the reason might have been, we needed to make sure this calf had something to eat, so he called me and asked me to bring out a bottle of colostrum. A baby calf has to have colostrum within 24 hours or so of it’s birth or it will die. We had no idea when this calf was born, but we had to hope it wasn’t to late to get her the needed colostrum.

While my Farmer fed the calf, I drove around the pasture looking for another new calf and cow, on the chance she was a twin. This had happened 3 times this calving season, where the momma walked away from the first born twin, so chances were it happened again. However, my search for a new calf came up empty. Dang, that would have been the easy find. So then I had to turned my focus on searching for a cow that had signs of “just calved”. What are the signs of “just calved” you may ask? Well…..I’m actually not the expert to ask this question. I really only know how to spot two signs…..barely. The first “just calved” sign that I know of is that their bag is really full, and it has not be sucked on. However, sometimes their bags are not really full, especially if she is a heifer. This makes it tough. Looking for a really full, “unsucked on” bag is really hard for me to spot. If there were 5 cows (well, maybe 2) standing side by side, in a corral, that I could compare, I may be able to spot it. While riding through 130 mother cows, out in the pasture, on my ATV, I was unable to spot this “just calved” sign.

The other “just calved” sign that I know of and I can spot a lot easier, is that the cow has the “remnants” of birthing still hang out her backside. Disgusting, but it’s a sure sign. And one I can spot! Sometimes cows can go for days like that. An older cow, especially, will have a tendency to take longer to clean. (Thats what we call it when the cow has pushed out the afterbirth after she has calved) Since I was relying on this sign, of course the cow in question would have cleaned right away. That’s seems to be how it happens. After driving around and around the pasture, looking at over 100 cows’ bags and butts, I found nothing. This little calf was truely abandoned. So to the corral we took the new orphan calf, without a momma. She was to be our new bottle baby. Maybe, if another cow lost her calf, this orphan would get a chance at having a momma.

Within the following month, this little calf went through a lot. We did have 2 cows lose their calves, so we had the opportunity to try to convince one of them to love our orphan calf. The first cow was a pretty snotty cow. Well, actually she was a full blown B*!#h. She had no interest in the calf at all. Then when B*!#h cow started to go after my Farmer a couple of times, it was not worth the hassle with her. The next cow we tried was very well mannered and it looked like the convincing session was going to work. Then one morning when I went to feed the calf, she was acting really strange. She couldn’t stand very long, and she kept bellering. She acted as if she was in pain. I got her to drink a little milk and I gave her some ibuprofen. Yes, I felt she had a headache. Fulling expecting her to be dead in the next few hours, I went home sad. My Farmer called me a few hours later and told me the calf was up walking around, but seemed weak. That gave me hope! We continued to bottle feed her and give her medicine and she slowly improved. With her issues, we stopped trying to get her a new momma and we became her loving meal providers. Which was a bit sad, because she really loved having a momma to eat from. This is when I named her Baby Girl.

We still do not know what happened with her. She had started to developed a lump on the side of her jaw. We were thinking it was an abscess, but hadn’t had a chance to examine it. A few days after I found her bellering and acting strange in the corral, I noticed the lump had gone away. A few days after that, her eye started seeping, then it turned white and she could not see. By this time however, she was back to feeling really good and was eagerly waiting for her bottle every day. She just looked weird and a bit creepy. This is when she got the name One Eyed Betty.

I still call her Baby Girl. She comes running to me when I call it out. Her eye is no longer white, yet it is a tad bit cloudy. I believe she can see out of it, just not sure how well. My unprofessional, not a veterinarian option, is that the infection she had in her jaw somehow broke out and traveled up into her brain and then out her eyeball. I told my Farmer my diagnosis and he just shook his head and said whatever. He has no idea what happened, as he had never seen anything like it before.

Now Baby Girl is doing really good. She still gets one bottle of milk a day and is out munching on green grass the rest of the time. As for her future, being a bottle fed baby, she will not grow as well as the other calves do that get their nutrition from a momma cow, so she won’t bring much money at a sale. I’m getting a little to attached to her, so she will probably stay here on the farm and become a pain in the butt, like most bottle fed calves become as they get older. Maybe, eventually, we will breed her. And hopefully, when she has a calf of her own, she will be a better momma then hers was…..whoever that was.

If you are driving by our place, and see the one little calf out in the pasture by herself, it’s probably Baby Girl. And now you know her story. She makes me feel good every day when I take her a bottle. She has pure joy when she sees me. Well, it might be the bottle that gives her the joy, but I can still tell myself it’s me she likes seeing. That’s what makes me feel that I am Livin’ the Life, the Farm Life that is…..