Post by Jennifer on Feb 11, 2009 16:25:48 GMT -5
I really, really didn't want to dehorn my girls. I had 8 with horns from heifers to 5yr old. Everybody (AI guy, DH, farmer friends, etc.) kept pushing me and telling me how bad horns were and I disagreed. I am very hard headed and I had never had a single incidence from a horn, accidentally or on purpose. Then along came Mable. She was born to us and as a young one we never had problems but as she got older she was trying to move up the rankings. We have two 'boss' cows that were both dehorned when we got them and they kept all the horned girls in line, especially Mable. Last fall when we started adding to our herd it finally became a problem. Mable wanted to show all the new cows that she was above them in ranking. It only took about two days of me watching this (and chasing her with a broom, lol) to decide that I had to run the girls in two separate groups. So DH set up all the fencing for me. The last couple of months I have been constantly moving groups of cows around (horned girls here, non-horned girls there) and now we are getting ready to start spring calving so we have subdivided everyone (horned girls in milk, horned girls dry, non-horned girls in milk, non-horned girls dry) with correlating bales of hay. Then last week I went to milk and was watching DH run all these groups around and I decided I was finally ready. I called our guy that dehorns and within 24 hours had no horns left. The girls all look good and believe it or not only one of them bled. He took them off with ob wire and all 8 only cost me $60. I really would like a herd of horned Jerseys but unless they ALL have horns it just didn't work for me.