Sad day

S

 It's not 20 calves from 20 cows any more.

Yesterday no 20 (named Puni), which had been struggling anyway, started refusing to feed and looking more and more poorly.  At lunch time today I took her over to the vet who found she had infected joints in two legs.  They checked her out thoroughly and called me mid afternoon to say she had a poor prognosis - and ask me what did I want to do?

There was no guarantee she would pull through at all - but the real problem was that, even if she did, she would almost certainly have structural weakness in those two legs.  Her function in life, if she had been healthy, would have been to spend 10 to 12 years producing a calf a year.  It's harder to do that on wonky pins.

With much regret I told the vet to put her to sleep - and send me the bill.

The mother was a heifer called Trish - not Henny as reported earlier.  I'm not 100% sure how the initial mis-mothering occurred, but I won't cull Trish on one failure.  She'd better not have another next year though.
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