Post by mrowley9 on Dec 21, 2004 10:36:07 GMT -5
This is only the second time I've posted here. We got Cranberry, our Jersey, in October. She was supposed to calve in January but apparently the AI with the Jersey that "didn't" take, did, because we got a big surprise a week before THanksgiving (and three days after we did our last milking) with a Jersey bull in the field next to her! They both survived just fine desite our bumbling, and many thanks to Holly (I don't know where we'd be without her!). Everything seemed to be just fine and yesterday morning Cranberry was very bloated. We called Holly in a hurry ( at 6am no less!!) and gave Cranberry some oil and massaged her for a couple of hours. She looked much better yesterday and we took away all alfalfa hay and put her back on only high quality grass hay. She was slightly bloated again today and we did the oil treatment and massage again.
For some reason I got the mistaken notion that it was important for her to have plenty of alfalfa and not so much grass hay. I've done more research and I'm trying to decide how much and when to give her alfalfa again, but we are also wondering why was she bloating again today after taking away what we thought was causing the problem? She is on the 16% concentrate, but we realized yesterday that we thought she was getting around 10lbs a day but she was really getting about 12-13 lbs a day. We finally weighted the can we were using to measure and turns out it weight more than we thought. We've remedied that but after the bloat again today I'm feeling really overwhelmed. Is this girl even going to survive our bumbling? We've had the added problem of her getting pushy with us, especially my dh. She seems to like me best but out in the field she won't let me too close to her now, whereas right after she calved I even milked her a little out in the field when she was having a problem with her non-working quarter suddenly starting working and we were milking it as often as we could because it got so full.
Boy, I have a lot of issues going on huh?!
Any and all help and advice would be so appreciated. Our biggest concern right now is the bloat and why it's still going on.
Michele in NW WA
For some reason I got the mistaken notion that it was important for her to have plenty of alfalfa and not so much grass hay. I've done more research and I'm trying to decide how much and when to give her alfalfa again, but we are also wondering why was she bloating again today after taking away what we thought was causing the problem? She is on the 16% concentrate, but we realized yesterday that we thought she was getting around 10lbs a day but she was really getting about 12-13 lbs a day. We finally weighted the can we were using to measure and turns out it weight more than we thought. We've remedied that but after the bloat again today I'm feeling really overwhelmed. Is this girl even going to survive our bumbling? We've had the added problem of her getting pushy with us, especially my dh. She seems to like me best but out in the field she won't let me too close to her now, whereas right after she calved I even milked her a little out in the field when she was having a problem with her non-working quarter suddenly starting working and we were milking it as often as we could because it got so full.
Boy, I have a lot of issues going on huh?!
Any and all help and advice would be so appreciated. Our biggest concern right now is the bloat and why it's still going on.
Michele in NW WA