Drying Off Daisy (with Mastitis)

Daisy, our oldest Jersey cow and the matriarch of the herd, is pregnant and will be calving in a couple of months. Her due date is November 3rd.  We like to dry our cows off two months in advance of them calving in order to give them time to rest and to allow the cow to expend all her energy on developing the calf rather than producing milk.  It was high time for a rest for Daisy.  She's been in milk for a little over two years!

We were only milking her once a day, and she was only giving us around 3/4 of a gallon per day. Her milk is very rich with a high butterfat content.  Now in drying off a cow, if they are producing less than two gallons a day, you can pretty much just stop milking cold turkey.  They will dry off with no problem.  If they are producing more than 2 gallons a day, then you have to gradually dry them off. This was going to be easy.

Except we noticed a problem.  The muslin cloth that we use as a filter caught a clump of discharge in the milk.  You can see it in the photo below a little left of center.  This is infection and could be the beginnings of mastitis.  You don't want to play around with that - especially when we're drying her off and won't be milking the possible infection out anymore.

Mastitis?

Penicillin is an antibiotic that we're going to use to treat her.  This is really out of the ordinary for us. We hardly ever use antibiotics, but we want to get this under control.  Penicillin has a 48 hour layoff period after the injection where you must throw away the milk and not drink it.  Since we're drying her off, it is no problem.

The dosage is 1 ML for every 100 pounds, given for 3 days.  We want to ensure we give her the proper dosage, so we got out the Dairy weigh tape.  You place the tape around the animal, right behind the front legs, pull it together, and it will tell you what they weigh.  The Jersey line is the one at the bottom of the tape.  Holstein and Guernsey lines are on the first and second lines, respectively.  The tape showed that Daisy weighs a little more than 928 pounds, so this told us that we need to give her somewhere in the neighborhood of 9 1/4 ML of penicillin.

The weigh tape

While Tricia cleaned up the injection site with some rubbing alcohol and gauze, I drew the proper amount of penicillin in the syringe.

Filling the syringe

This is an intramuscular injection than is to be given in the neck.  You jab the needle all the way in at a 90 degree angle, pulling it out just a little to ensure that there is no blood in the base of the syringe.  You don't want to inject into a vein, as that is highly dangerous.  

Once you've seen no blood, you go ahead and inject the antibiotic into the neck muscle.  Daisy is not good with needles.  She snorted and moved around a lot.  We did our best to hold her, but even though she was tied down, she was a little hard to control.

She was happy when we were done.  We'll continue to give her two more doses of penicillin for the next two nights.  We will also check her bag to ensure that they are not hard or hot.  That would suggest mastitis.  After two days, all looks good but we'll continue to stay on top of it so that she doesn't get sick.  In about two months, Daisy will give us a little calf - hopefully a heifer to befriend Clarabelle.