Hi Bev; I'm still here. One of my young cows had a calf on Saturday. It's a small, first-time mother, and the calf was small (40-50 pounds). I don't know if it was premature, or just small, but it was weak and within 2 hours, it look dead.
twitching. We brought it in and put it in the bathtub with very warm water and rubbed it for about an hour.
fingers, so I gave it a bottle of milk replacer, egg, and molasses. It spent the afternoon on a beanbag chair in front of the woodstove.
When it was completely dry, we took it out and lured the mother into a box stall in the barn, and locked them in together. We got it a good drink off it's mother (who, fortunately, has good mothering instincts...first-timers sometimes don't, especially when you've taken the calf away).
It drinks on it's own now, and has been getting stronger and stronger, and this afternoon it escaped from the box stall and was wandering around the barn. When they are strong enough to get into mischief, you know they'll probably make it. It really cold and very windy here (-20 to -30 degree wind chill tonight), so I plan to keep them locked up until it warms up on Wednesday. That's been my life lately.
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