Aug 3 2008 calving

Still hot. When Becky and I went to get the cows tonight we noticed
Two heifers, Flan and Ghost, were in light labor - nothing serious, yet, just wandering around with their tails in the air and a look of bewilderment on their faces. We went back to milk with our fingers crossed that everything would go fine. An hour and a half later my dad rung to say that they'd both broken their water and had feet, and we went flying out there, happy - because there's little that can go wrong at that stage; the calf's in the birth canal, and once you can see the feet you know whether or not it's a breach presentation (the most common bad presentation). But there are still a few things that can go wrong.

Well, guess what.

Flan had hers no trouble - a big, beautiful, healthy little heifer calf - and she took to it instantly, and was being a good mother, something that's always a worry with the first-time calvers. But Ghost didn't progress at all. Nothing but feet. We wern't overly concerned at first, because heifers often take longer than the more experienced cows, but as time went on we got more and more worried.

Becky got up behind her and tried to pull the calf, with no success. She put her hand up into the vagina to check her as much as She dared (She only had wrist length milking gloves with and didn't want to go all the way in without a breeding glove for infection) and felt around, but couldn't feel a head. Becky said ghost was still pretty tight though.

We called mom and explained. "Leave her alone for a bit," she said.

This was reasonable enough. Becky has a reputation - and a bad habit - of getting too anxious to "help" cows calve; Becky likes getting involved. So we went back to the house, still worrying and restless and not at all happy, but trying to convince ourselves that we were just being paranoid. My parents were both trying to convince us of the same thing; I suspect they felt we were being just a little obsessive over the calf thing, as, okay, we probably are. By the time we went back to the field, I think all three of us were pretty well convinced that we were going to find Ghost happily licking off a calf that she'd been able to have once the nosy human stopped poking around in her vagina.

She wasn't. She was exactly as we left her; feet out to the knees, no head in sight.

We brought her in, headgated her, and washed her off enough that it was safe for Becky to go up in her. She put some breeding gloves on and went groping around in her vagina. Everytime Becky pushed her arm in farther, ghost let out a loud moo.

Trying to figure out what's going on inside a cow isn't easy at the best of times; when she's calving, it's a bit like sticking your arm in a sack and trying to figure out what's in there by feel alone, except that everything's very slippery and the sack is trying to squeeze your arm off. "Can you feel a head?" my mom asked.

"No." she groped some more. At one point she even went in ghost's butt rectally to try and get a better feel of the calfs position "I feel a neck."

This was seriously bad news - it meant that we had a head tuck, a relatively rare but unpleasant presentation. In a normal presentation, the nose comes out overtop of the feet, but in a head tuck, the head somehow gets caught on the cow's hipbone as it passes and turns. Once it's in the birth canal there's no room for the head to turn back, but at the same time the birth canal is not wide enough for the head and shoulders to come out together.

There are two ways to fix this. The second is to get a special piece of sharp wire, work it around the calf's neck, and cut the calf's head off.

we were, obviously, not thrilled about that one, so Becky pulled on new gloves and started trying the first one, which is to push the calf back out of the birth canal into the body cavity, which will (theoretically) give you enough room to pop the calf's head back around and then pull it into the birth canal in a proper position. This is not all that easy to do. For one thing, Ghost was fighting her all the way. She is a good girl, and was being pretty tolerant about the whole human-with-hand-up-vagina thing, but once she started pushing she'd had it. As far as she was concerned, she'd worked damned hard to get that calf as far out as it was, and now here Becky was pushing the blasted thing back in. She pushed back with all her strength, which was, needless to say, more strength than Becky had in her entire body.(Becky is shorter than me, but she is stronger, so I was glad she was doing this) Becky had both her arms in ghost at this point.

For another thing, even when she managed to get the calf back into the body cavity, getting hold of its head and pulling it around was absolutely not happening. she couldn't tell, at any given moment, whether she had hold of the thing's ear or its tongue or its neck or had her finger in its bloody eye; everything was insanely slippery; the legs kept flailing around in Becky's way; her arm was being squeezed by what felt like a rabid boa constrictor in becky's words; and Ghost was still determinedly trying to get the calf back into the birth canal, and frequently succeeding. Mom, in the meantime, was saying helpful things like, "Haven't you got it yet?" and "Push on the shoulder. If you were doing it right, the head would be popping right around." I think Becky would have strangled her, except her right hand was pretty well otherwise occupied.

Finally there was a sliding and a kind of "pop" sensation, and Ghost gave an almighty heave, and Becky's arm and the calf's legs both came wizzing out the back end - but with the calf's nose peeping out overtop of them, this time. She pulled of her gloves and we started pulling, and Ghost, valiant little girl that she was, started pushing with all her might. We pulled, but it wouldn't budje. So, Becky pulled on another glove and started pushing extra lube in ghosts vagina. All the manipulation probably dried some of the natural lube off. We were getting a little worried at this point. No sooner than Becky pulled her arm out that ghost gave a big push and the calf was lying on the ground, soaking wet - and shaking its head, and coughing; the damned thing was, for a miracle, alive. Thank goodness for J-lube.

We stood there a minute just getting our breath. Becky pulled her glove off and threw it on the pile of other used ones. 12 total (She went through quite a few pulling this calf, mom and I had a pair on too)