November 17th we finally were able to get #11 back into the head gate to remove her trocar. You can leave a trocar in permanently but it’s not something I like to do. We decided that since we had all hands on deck, we’d go ahead and weigh all the cows and update their records again. This would give us a chance to see what has happened to their weights since coming back to the farm.
We’d just started processing cows when Miguel noticed that #3, whom we’d just run through the head gate, was having trouble. Maybe she’d eaten something that was bad while in the barn yard, a piece of plastic or something? We quickly isolated her and put her back into the corral to run through again. We got her back into the head gate and looked into her mouth and down her throat. Yes that’s as difficult and messy as it sounds. No plastic or obstruction that we could see. Weird. It’s almost like she’s bloated or something….
A quick check on her rumen and yes indeed, she had begun to bloat. Conveniently right there while we were already working the cows. What are the odds? We already had my vet bag on hand so it was a simple matter of shaving her down and inserting a trocar. However this was Makayla’s first time inserting a trocar so this was a special time for her. She has aspirations of being a large animal vet so a little home surgery was right up her alley. At one point she was taking selfies with the cow when I walked back up. That was a first.
The trocar went in fine and we quickly had a big rush of gas blowing out, along with some grass and whatnot that she’d eaten. Since she was coughing a bit occasionally we also had showers of gas and goo occasionally which covered both myself and Makayla. Makayla was laughing and thought it was great, I was trying to stay out of the line of fire.
We did eventually get the trocar out of #11 and she is doing fine. But now we need to bring the cows back again in a few days and take #3 back through the head gate to get this new trocar out of her. It’s always something.
Now for the weights. I’m trying out a Google Docs spreadsheet to see if it works well for publishing these weights. I have lots of experience with spreadsheets, and decent experience with WordPress. Bringing the two together, not so much. We’ll see how it goes.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YPSzeMiPzAPKWqS73dCTty3jngQpOUpZRYNqx78AM64/pubhtml