Kat Dancing

Nothing's ever simple.

My parents left for Europe, and the next day we had a cow abort her calf six weeks early. The poor thing was dead, of course - it never breathed, never had a chance - but the mother was in good shape. And coming into her milk.

Meaning we had to milk her.

Did you know there are muscles in your hand that never get used for anything but hand-milking? Okay, I'm sure they get used for something else, as it's unlikely that the Grand Plan put muscles in the hand on the off chance that we humans would someday get the idea of squeezing milk out of cow's teats, but the point is, when you suddenly put a lot of strain on those muscles it's painful. Nor is milking a cow a quick and simple task. Chameleon was an absolute love about the whole thing, luckily, but with the bro and I both working it milking her out took fifteen minutes of hard work, minimum. On the one occasion I had to milk her out by myself I was sitting there for a full forty minutes.

(As a side note, we have a hundred cows. Every so often some innocent asks whether we milk by hand. Reading the above, doing some simple multiplication, and imagining severe and never-ending hand cramps will probably help explain the glazed look of horror I give such people.)

Then, this past Saturday, the bro rung me from the field to say we'd another dead calf.

Now, this has good points and bad points. The good point is that, with two cows, it's worth our while to fire up the milk pump and rig a can. We can milk by machine now. Bliss.

The bad point is that once may be a fluke, but twice suggests that we've got a problem. The weather's been good and nothing's happened to stress the animals, which leaves the fear of some kind of abortive disease running through the herd, which would be Very Bad Indeed. We have, as I said, a hundred cows; picking up a hundred pitiful little calf-corpses is not how I care to spend my spring. Not to mention the fear it could be leptospirosis - unlikely, as we vaccinate for lepto, but vaccines have been known to fail. And lepto is a zoonosis - we can catch it from the cows, in other words. A Kiwi friend of mine spent a year in the hospital after catching lepto off a cow.

The lab was closed on Saturday, of course (lazy, overfed government peons) so we put the dead calf and the placenta on ice and the bro drove it in this morning. Now we can only wait and hope that the whole thing really is a fluke.

The other, more minor bad point is that while Chameleon is a love - a few cards short of a full deck, maybe, but generally a love - Didgeridoo, the new cow, is being a right whore. I chased her over half the farm to get her up here, and when we put her in the pen with Chameleon, it took her about two seconds to realize that she was, for the first time in her life, the biggest cow around, and about another two seconds to celebrate by smearing Chameleon all over the side of the pen. The ones who've been at the bottom of the heap all their lives are always the worst... she kicks in the parlour, she hogs the feed, and poor Chameleon runs to the gate and starts bawling every time she sees us, clearly saying, "Why'd you put this crazy bitch in here? Take her away! I wanna be an only cow again!"

Oh well. Weather's been nice.

All this could, I suppose, explain why I haven't posted here in over a week, but actually it doesn't. I've just been lazy.