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Sad Day

Damn, It’s been hovering around the mid 80s all week!
I’m a cold-weather type of guy and I’m really not made for this at all. I’ve basically entrenched myself in the room whenever I’m not at my lovely air-conditioned workplace. Poor Amme may has to work in this weather every day! She works way to hard.

Speaking of the farm, we had a really sad day yesterday.

Amme called me from the farm and asked me if I wanted to go over there to watch a heifer named raisin give birth to twins. I thought i’d be pretty cool so I drove right over. We played with the calves a while since she wasn’t ready yet. You wouldn’t think so, but calves are so playful! They love to play tag and prance and buck around. They’re smart too. The heifers actually have a little button they push with their nose when they want to fill their water bowls while they’re in their milking stalls. One of them even knows how to rub her collar clasp against a nub of metal in her milking stall until it opens. Then she tries to saunter past us to freedom like we won’t notice this 800lb cow walking by.

raisin was in her own little birthing pen, laying down and having contractions. Finally she started pushing out the first sack. She’d push and it’d poke out, then she’d stop pushing and I’d go back in. Push out, then back in… This went on for half an hour or so before it finally stayed out. Then a little hoof poked out. It was all white and smooth. After that she couldn’t get any further so one of the girls working put some gloves on and helped the calf out. She checked it’s responsiveness once the head was out, but it wasn’t responding at all. She’d thought it had responded earlier when she checked but it may have been a contraction squeezing her hand. Once the calf was all the way out she could see it was clearly dead. The umbilical cord was pretty full of blood, and this was a premature birth anyway, so the calf had most likely been dead for several hours. It was so heartbreaking. All we could do is stare at poor raisin as she looked over her shoulder at us. I wanted to just hug her like a sad puppy but we had to let her be.

The calf lay on the wood-chip lined floor. My heart felt heavy in my chest. I felt the urgent need to do something, or tell her that it might not be dead, that we didn’t know for sure and should try to get it breathing, but it was futile. I felt so helpless. Amme would look at me, and I’d look at her, and all I could do was put my arm around her.

The second calf came right after, and it too was still-born. I was dreading that as soon as the first one had come out, but had hoped in my heart that this one would make it. This was was much skinnier yet it took almost 30 minutes to get it out. We had to lube it up and pull hard. Normally we’d let it take its time, but the calf was already lost and raisin had been through a lot. Once the second calf was out we got raisin to get up and examine her calves. She was a first-time mother so she needed to see them to understand what that heck had been going on this whole time. I could tell she understood, and started licking the calves forcefully, trying to wake them up. We let her grieve over them for a while, then took them away so she could rest. Sadness is rare in my life, but when it comes along, it’s heart-wrenching.

The ironic part of this whole story is that since both the calves were male, they’d have been sold for veal anyway.