Calf Bloat Update

Welcome To Wilmoth Farms posted on her blog some tips and a link in my comments about Angus' bloat and I am sorry that I haven't left you a comment, well actually I tried but it just wouldn't work.

I am so happy that you got DSL, some of us are going to be on Dial-up forever it seems.

Angus hasn't had another episode of bloat, just those three times, I doctored him like I would a goat with bloat which was baking soda, veg. oil and bouncing his belly.

I talked to a neighbor who raises around a 100 bottle calves a year and he said that he has a chronic bloating calf right now that he put a plastic valve in. He said that she was the first chronic bloater that he has ever had. He has only had to tube a few on rare occasions in the past.

I am not sure what caused this in Angus but he is over it now, he may have just gotten too much green grass because we were in the process of weaning him. He may have gotten into the goat mineral also.

I am not too happy with him, he nearly killed me yesterday trying to get me to give him a bottle. He is too big to punch and butt me. I couldn't get away from him, he kept circling me and spinning me around. I got so tired and dizzy that I thought that I would go down.

I am on foal watch with Jetta right now, she is waxed and ready to go. I set up with her last night and hopefully she will go early this evening or early tonight.

Calf Bloat

Angus is now 12 weeks old, he looks really good and has been very healthy but yesterday evening he developed bloat. I gave him baking soda and a little veg. oil. My DH bounced his belly around until we got some good burps.

I checked on him at around 2:00 am and he was bloated again, went through the same process plus gave him yogurt and he responded well again.

I just went out and he looks bloated again. Any ideas what I can do and what we are doing wrong to cause this??

My DH is still giving him a bottle once per day just to get rid of the replacer that we have. He has free choice calf starter, calf manna, hay, grass and water.

Just When I Needed You!

Rachel at Welcome To Wilmoth Farms was hit very hard in Kentucky by the ice storm that passed through on Tuesday, January 27th.

If you follow my blog you know that during that storm our little Angus was born. My first thought while he was thawing out in our living room was, I knew Rachel will have some advice for me since it has been many, many years since we raised any calves on bottles.

I had many questions, like how long he should have colostrum, since his Mother never let him nurse? If the goat colostrum that I had on hand would work since the roads were so bad that we couldn't get out to get anything else? How much should he be drinking and how often?

Then the really, really big question, how do you stop these scours????

But alas, Rachel is still without power and Angus may be half grown before she is back among the enlightened. She did read my post about Angus and left a comment but she is only checking in when she can. Since for some reason I am not able to post comments on her blog, I will just have to communicate with her here.

Hello, Rachel, hope you are doing well and I hope that your place is thawed out by now and clean-up is nearly done. I really hope that you get your electricity back soon. But I must say that these on again, off again scours are driving me mad!

Angus is healthy and strong, has bonded with my DH and follows him everywhere he goes. He always runs in a gallop with a few twists and bucks. When he is hungry, he comes to the door and rattles the doorknob, this gave me quite a fright the first time that he did it and I was here all alone.

Since he is staying in the barn right outside my living room door, I am seeing most of his bowel movements and smelling them. Some are firm but some like the one that I slid in the other night and almost fell are very runny.

I would appreciate your home remedy for scours very much. He is currently getting 6 quarts of medicated replacer per day with some yogurt and an egg in each bottle. He is also getting mushed up Calf Manna and we are putting a couple of tablespoons of Pepto-Bismol in each bottle if he appears to need it.

Angus Antics

Angus found his voice this morning and he was crying for food. My DH woke me up to let me know that the milk was definitely getting through, he had a BM all over his bedroom and my wonderful Husband told me that Angus would have to have a bath. Then my wonderful Husband kissed me goodbye and went to work.

I got up, fixed Angus a bottle and was waiting while it warmed up, it wasn't completely warm when he started crashing through the barrier that I had put up in the doorway to his bedroom.

I grabbed the bottle and moved the barrier, it was obvious that he had gotten a good night's sleep. He galloped to me and started butting me with his nose. He nearly knocked me down before I could get the bottle in his mouth. He drained the quart of milk in about one minute and was wanting more.

When his bottle was empty and I went for more milk, it was "bull in a china shop" time. He started running, leaping and bucking all through the house. He knocked stuff over and kicked and ran into everything. Then he would run over to me and start punching me to get more milk.

His next feeding will have to be with the two quart calf bottle and I am going to have to get some milk replacer fairly quickly because my little doe is not going to be able to support this boy.

I realized rather quickly that poor Angus was not going to be able to be a house calf after all. I ran out the door leaving it open behind me, he ran out in hot pursuit. I can't put him back in the stall with the Does, that would just be to cruel for them. He would pester them into anemia. So he is just running loose out in the barn and getting into everything that he can find to get into.

I must now go tackle the mess that he left in his bedroom, while his next bottle of goat's milk warms in hot water. It is certainly amazing the difference one night can make in a calf's life.

Angus

I have kept you in suspense long enough. We went to our neighbors on Tuesday night for supper, it was the night of the ice storm. We feasted on tender Pork Roast that is like no other, fried plantains with garlic and salt, beans and rice cooked to perfection, boiled potatoes and squash, followed by wonderful lemon meringue pie.

The neighbor mentioned that he was afraid one of his cows was going to calve that night. He really doesn't have a good place to get a cow up and with the weather like it was there wasn't much he could do because all of his pasture is on a hillside.

The next day we got a call saying that she had a bull calf and she was rejecting it. My DH went to help him get her up and try to help the baby nurse. The calf was chilled, weak and covered in ice and mommy just flat didn't like him. She was under the distinct impression that one of the other cow's calves was hers and they could not convince her otherwise.

The calf was given to me, my Husband carried it home wrapped in a wool blanket on his tractor through the ice and snow. I instructed him to bring him into the house to thaw him out.

He thawed out nicely. He accepted a couple of syringes of warm goat's milk to get him kick started. I had some powdered goat colostrum that I mixed into a quart size bottle of warm goat's milk. It wasn't long before he was dry, warm and on his feet giving the house an inspection, he found it to be calf friendly.

With the weather and roads so bad, we had to go to another neighbor's to bum some cow colostrum and an antibiotic as a precaution against whatever might attack him in his weakened state. His nose was already dripping snot on assorted family members.

All went very will and he drank a quart of the cow colostrum from his bottle with so much gusto that he collapsed the bottle at 11:00 last night after we moved him out in the stall with my two does.

The does were not happy campers but we didn't have any other choice. They thought that he was most certainly a fanged, clawed, goat eating predator of some sort. They totally panicked every time he moved. It is a very large stall but they kept trying to run through the walls and jump over the gate. I don't think either of them slept a wink all night because they both had to have both eyes on him at all times in case he made his move.

My problem started this morning, he wouldn't take a bottle. I kept trying all day and could only get a couple of ounces in him at a time and he didn't want it. He laid and trembled.

I was home alone and there was no way I could get him up or carry him but he finally got to his feet and I guided him back into the house at which time he peed on my best rug which made me feel much better because it let me know that he was at least getting something. My estimate was that he relieved himself of three gallons at least.

He did finally drink about a pint tonight and I think that he will drink more later. I know he isn't getting enough and I suppose he will stay in the house. He is laying in front of my refrigerator right now and I can't even get myself something to drink.

More later...

Rested

I slept through the night for the first time in ages. I feel much better this morning. Although my back didn't like it much. I found that my back doesn't hurt as badly when I get up several times during the night. Just like my back doesn't like to sit in a chair for more than 10 minutes or stand on my feet for more than 5 minutes. I guess maybe I should set my alarm and continue to get up during the night.

I want to thank all of my friends who called, left comments here on my blog and sent me e-mails of encouragement through the last two weeks.

I have had people ask, why we just didn't put her down in the first place. Well, if we could have seen the future and had known that her kidneys were defective, we would have. But we have pulled high risk foals back from the brink before and so we couldn't let her go without exhausting every avenue of treatment. As long as there is hope, I find it hard to give up on them.

We had a foal years ago that was born to a mother with no milk, she was a fescue baby. This was back before the fescue problem had even been identified. We had just bought the mare and didn't know she was bred. The baby got no colostrum, it was also back before any of our local stores carried mare milk replacer, I don't even know if there was such a thing at that time anyway. I am really telling my age here. But anyway, we put her on Carnation calf milk replacer.

We didn't have the internet then and we didn't know anything about raising a foal on a bottle but we did know how to raise calves that way, so that is how we raised Bambi. She was just a little, half pony, half horse, sorrel filly.

She got septic, navel ill and her all of her joints swelled up. All of this happened during the coldest part of winter. I remember crawling to the barn on the ice to give her bottles. She got to the point that she couldn't stand or get to her feet.

She got scours, got dehydrated and even got pneumonia at one point. We just pumped her full of antibiotics and somehow pulled her through it all. Looking back on it now, I cannot believe that she survived but she did and went on to become a riding horse and the people that bought her from us even raised foals with her. She lived to be an old horse but did get arthritis when she got older.

Rain, Mud and Wind

My husband talked to a neighbor last night while hunting for my dog. Angel had disappeared, which is not like her at all. She never gets too far away from her goats. But when it was time to feed yesterday evening, she was no where to be found and didn't come when called.

The neighbor raises bottle calves and has an abundance of them, people just keep bringing him more all of the time. He has suffered many losses this year due to the weather.

He has very nice huts set up for them with lots of straw but he says that the huts have to have a door and he just can't keep all of this rain out. Then he brought to my husband's attention that with every rain that we are getting, it is being followed by lots of wind. This does dry the ground up somewhat but having a strong wind after a cold rain is very hard on young animals. His bottle calves are getting pneumonia and even with antibiotics, vitamins and minerals, he isn't having too much luck saving them.

Not having a dry place to bed down is hard on any animal but especially the young and with the weather that we are having there just isn't any such thing as a dry spot. Which brings me back to Angel, we had called and called for her and she didn't show up. I did think that I had heard her rabies tag tinkling a couple of times inside our barn/house. I looked around but didn't see her. My husband was very upset because he doesn't want a dog that runs the neighborhood. I just couldn't believe that she would leave the goats like that.

Finally later in the evening I detected some movement in the corner of our barn/house, back behind our lawn tractor. She was hiding in a nice dry spot, she knows that she isn't allowed in this barn. My husband had mercy on her because as he pointed out, she is just wanting someplace dry to sleep to get ready for her night watch.

Our goat/chicken shed is continually wet this spring, we clean it out and put fresh straw down but with the goats and dog tracking in and out in the wet and mud, it doesn't stay dry for very long. Goats are also very indiscriminate about where they use the bathroom, they just go wherever the urge hits them. So, with the lot being nothing but a mud pit and the shed not being much better, Angel sought and found a warm, dry spot for a much needed rest.

Another dilemma that we are facing is that we don't have anyplace to put the new foal and his mother to make room for the other two mares that are overdue to foal. Under normal circumstances we turn the mares with their new foals out on pasture as soon as the mares have had a few days to recoup. But this weather makes it impossible to do that.

My DH keeps saying that we are never having March babies again but I keep telling him that this is the first year that we have had these kind of troubles. Our neighbor with the calves has never had these problems before either. It rained here all night again last night and the wind is suppose to be strong today with the temperature dropping all day down to 30º tonight.

Additional thought: I posted on the first day of March that it came in like a Lamb, yesterday was the last day of March and it certainly went out like a Lion!