Dead Cow

Another old Farm Side for you today. Dead Cow actually left us several years ago, passing away in her sleep in her stall one night. She lived to be a very elderly cow, despite her perils of Pauline sort of life.

Born in 1992, and a little on the small side, she was an ordinary black heifer. We called her 403, the number on her eartag, although her name is Frieland AE Dandy Vanity. She quickly faded into bovine obscurity, merely another in a barn full of heifers.

In 1995 a horrible strain of pneumonia swept through the milk cows. 403 was milking by then, a little on the kicky side, but not bad, just another bovine in a barn full. She stood in a stall way back by the calf tie-up, about as far from the barn door as a cow could get.

When I went into milk her one night during the epidemic she seemed hot and sluggish. There were funny little bumps on her rib cage. I poked at one and it crackled like cellophane. “Oh, boy,” I thought, “this is real bad.” Crackly lumps on a cow’s body indicate air under the skin, which emanates from lungs that are somehow pierced. The poor cow had a temperature of 105 degrees too.

We called our vet, who examined her and pronounced her very seriously ill. She had pneumonia and one of her lungs had begun leaking air. He treated her with a new antibiotic and instructed us to move her to a stall near the door. According to his reckoning, she would most likely be dead by morning. She could barely stagger around the barn to the first stall and once there stood with her head down and ears drooping, ignoring the tasty second-cutting hay we offered her.

We felt lousy about it, I’ll tell you. Half a dozen other cows were sick by the time we finished milking although none as bad as 403. We injected them with the new drug, fed them the choicest feed we had and went to the house, debating where we could find a chain to drag the dead cow out with in the morning.

She didn’t die. When we nervously peeked in from the milkhouse the next morning she stood in her new stall with a huge mouthful of hay, chewing eagerly, eyes bright, ears up.

It took several weeks for the air under her skin to dissipate, and she didn’t milk all that great that year, but she surely lived. When we moved her back to her old stall, she had earned a new name. She was now known as “Dead Cow”. Decent people would have been eternally grateful to the vet for saving her and exultant that such an effective new antibiotic was available. Brats that we are, we instead teased the poor man unmercifully and pointed out the dead cow, happily chomping feed, every time he came to the farm.

The next spring Dead had another bout of pneumonia, but once again survived. She kept right on surviving until last February when, at nine years of age, she had a huge bull calf. She pinched a nerve in her back giving birth so both hind legs knuckled over at the fetlock. When she tried to stand up she would panic and scramble frantically, injuring herself worse each time. Our current vet took a look at her and, once again, predicted a grim outcome for the old cow. With both hind legs bent and her body bruised and battered from her frantic struggles, it looked like she was going to be living up to her name. She still stood in the same stall, where Liz milks now. The stall is narrow and Liz was afraid Dead would fall on her, so we moved her again, over to a wider stall on my side of the barn. We tied a 2 X 4 to the dividers in the new stall so when she tried to get up, she could get a good grip with her injured legs and filled the stall with sand and straw. The vet gave her some anti-inflammatory drugs.

Thus Dead Cow and I began a long course of working together to get her healthy again. Despite her injuries she was milking well and the same determination that got her through her other illnesses was evident again. She learned to dig her toes into the 2 X 4 to get up and stood, swaying precariously, while I milked her. By summer she was staggering out to pasture with the rest, never left behind, just frog-hopping along to keep up. There was a problem though. She had stood all her milking life in the stall by the calf tie up and, by heck, she was determined to keep standing there. Liz was still afraid of her so she had to stay on my side. In the hurly burley of cows racing into the barn to get their grain there was no way to turn her north without causing a pile up, so we reached a compromise. Dead ran into her old stall and gobbled down a scoop of grain, then, when all the other cows were locked up, she teetered back around the barn to her new stall for another scoop. It was late last fall before we finally got her weaned to going straight to my side of the barn.

She had more adventures this year. A cat scared her one night during milking and she broke her stanchion out of its moorings and galloped around the barn in terror, with it banging around her neck. It finally fell off and she ran outdoors, where she spent the night, refusing to even approach the barn door. Next morning she came in as if nothing had happened. She lost a pregnancy too and it looked like curtains for her then. She bred right back though.

Lately there’s been talk among upper management of selling her before she comes up with another way to kill herself.

Over my dead body. D C and I became good buddies over the last couple of years. She doesn’t fall on me and I don’t get mad at her for running around clanging her stanchion and scaring the other cows. She can walk right now too and she’s due for a new calf in May.

Besides she gave 19,000 pounds of milk last year.

Not bad for a dead cow.