Post by Joelle on Mar 11, 2010 12:47:18 GMT -5
Just thought I'd share this with all of you, because that went SO much better than I thought it would.
We took Sugar to the vet this morning to confirm bred/not bred. Unfortunately, the verdict was "not bred", which is aggravating because we've been trying SO hard to AI her to a Guernsey. The vet suspects there's something wrong with the semen at this point, and she's sure there's nothing wrong with Sugar as far as being ABLE to breed, so I don't think we're going to bother with that last straw. Sugar is finally gonna get a proper BF, it seems.
We had decided that if she was still open we would get her dehorned while we were there. She has never been aggressive or anything, but her horns point outward more than Scarlette's do, and as we intend to sell her after the whole nursing on Scarlette thing we figured it would make her more sell-able. Plus, we want to work some more with her on lead training and such (she's been a bit spoiled, what with our being distracted by Scarlette lately), and it would just plain be easier if we didn't have to worry about her horns.
So, we got her dehorned today - and it went really well!!! The vet, first off, is terrific and wouldn't even consider dehorning without numbing her up really well first. She used this trick she learned from an old vet to tie baling twine around her poll to help minimize bleeding, and then she used a wire saw to saw through the horns. Sugar fussed a fair bit with that first horn, but didn't even flinch for the second one. She got a shot of banamine for pain today and we have one to give her tomorrow, but all things told I think she was more upset about the lidocaine than she was the actual dehorning process.
She is home and in her own paddock now, where she mooed once at her buddies across the fence and settled right into munching on hay. I think she's going to do just fine, she seems a bit stunned but not thoroughly traumatized like I was afraid she would be.
Maybe it's because I'm a nurse and I'm relatively pragmatic about blood and pain, but I was expecting that to be SO much worse than it was. Maybe I just have a terrific vet, who took great pains to make this as comfortable as possible. Or maybe Sugar is just a hard-to-traumatize cow. But that went VERY well, and I wanted to let everyone know that it IS possible to dehorn a cow without nightmares afterwards. ;D
We took Sugar to the vet this morning to confirm bred/not bred. Unfortunately, the verdict was "not bred", which is aggravating because we've been trying SO hard to AI her to a Guernsey. The vet suspects there's something wrong with the semen at this point, and she's sure there's nothing wrong with Sugar as far as being ABLE to breed, so I don't think we're going to bother with that last straw. Sugar is finally gonna get a proper BF, it seems.
We had decided that if she was still open we would get her dehorned while we were there. She has never been aggressive or anything, but her horns point outward more than Scarlette's do, and as we intend to sell her after the whole nursing on Scarlette thing we figured it would make her more sell-able. Plus, we want to work some more with her on lead training and such (she's been a bit spoiled, what with our being distracted by Scarlette lately), and it would just plain be easier if we didn't have to worry about her horns.
So, we got her dehorned today - and it went really well!!! The vet, first off, is terrific and wouldn't even consider dehorning without numbing her up really well first. She used this trick she learned from an old vet to tie baling twine around her poll to help minimize bleeding, and then she used a wire saw to saw through the horns. Sugar fussed a fair bit with that first horn, but didn't even flinch for the second one. She got a shot of banamine for pain today and we have one to give her tomorrow, but all things told I think she was more upset about the lidocaine than she was the actual dehorning process.
She is home and in her own paddock now, where she mooed once at her buddies across the fence and settled right into munching on hay. I think she's going to do just fine, she seems a bit stunned but not thoroughly traumatized like I was afraid she would be.
Maybe it's because I'm a nurse and I'm relatively pragmatic about blood and pain, but I was expecting that to be SO much worse than it was. Maybe I just have a terrific vet, who took great pains to make this as comfortable as possible. Or maybe Sugar is just a hard-to-traumatize cow. But that went VERY well, and I wanted to let everyone know that it IS possible to dehorn a cow without nightmares afterwards. ;D