Cows, calves and veterinary

67

Sixty-seven is doing her best to convince me that it was a totally wrong decision making sure her momma only had little beefie heifers.





Sixty-three herself is daily trying to convince me of that too :-)


Did I say there was a story there? Oh yeah, well, 63 will be checked in another month or so to make sure she *is* carrying a wee beefie calf.


She's a large crossbred cow, good milker, lots of attitude - which translates at times to turning half a row of cows upside down just because she feels like it, kicking my hand away if I want to check her milk before putting cups on - that sort of thing. Well, I've got a lot of equally good milkers with much nicer attitudes and there's a high heritability for temperament, so 63 very quickly got herself on the 'mate to Angus only' list.


Sixty-seven is her daughter from their old farm, since her previous owner hadn't put her on such a list. She has no temperament issues, at all. But not yet such a good milker either. Funny how that happens - my 61 is a Hugo grand-daughter with only about half the nasty temperament her mother had but also about half of her milking ability too; her mother (PWD's 96) would have been best heifer in her first year, probably best 3-yr old too the following year.





So anyway, the mating information had finally come through onto Mindapro and the first thing I noticed was that the first cow on the 'expected calving by date' list was a heifer who had been bulling (and had every mating recorded, and passed on to LIC) right up until the begining of January.


So I went through that list and my records, and the sad story is that LIC had allowed 9 errors through that did not relate to the information I had sent them.


A further two errors were because I hadn't given them the information. One was a heifer with a late cycle that wasn't mated. The other was number 63, who had no mating recorded.


I turned back to the date she'd supposedly been mated on (according to my records) in the AB book and there found, written directly onto the back page (not the white one that gets sent to LIC) '63 wasted straw - Te Maniu'.


And then I remembered. During my first week of DIY AB, 63 was one of those extremely deep, stroppy cows - after several attempts to get the semen through a cervix I couldn't even reach, (in the course of which a straw landed on the ground and got stood on), it had been another case of 'practically there', she'd started bouncing around again and the inseminator had slipped back out, I decided I'd had enough, let the contents of the straw go where-ever they happened to be and decided she wasn't even bulling anyway and I'd draft her again in a few days when she came on properly.


And since I didn't think she'd been properly on heat to start with and certainly wouldn't get in calf, I didn't record it for LIC as a mating - simply as a wasted straw for my own records.


Somehow, I must have forgotten to look out for her - because I didn't notice that she never came back on heat.





The PD will tell all, calving next year will verify. There's three possibilities - a) she's empty and not cycling, b) she's in calf to a vigorous (or lucky) piece of DNA from one of those 'wasted' straws or c) she only had 'silent' heats and then the bull got her in calf when I wasn't looking.


Since I don't believe in big healthy cows like 63 being anoestrus or having silent heats, 'b' is most likely.


On the other hand, she did get herself on the PD list late in the season for being seen in company with a bulling cow so...

posted by nellta holdings @ 2:30 PM