Elsie's BoBo

 

This is our girl, Elsie.  Elsie is a Jersey heifer and she should be a cow.  What I'm meaning by that is that she should have calved by now as she's been exposed during heat cycles to several different bulls.  It just never "took."  We had the vet look at her and it turns out she had some cysts on her ovaries.  He took care of them and supposedly, she's good to go.  We put her and Nick (our Jersey bull) together for date night while she was in standing heat, and we observed them romancing.  We marked down the date and so far, it looks like she skipped a cycle.  That means perhaps she's pregnant.

She'd better be!  She's a fat cow.  I tell her every day, "Elsie, you'd better be pregnant.  If you're not, you'd better get pregnant fast.  You are a milk cow.  Cows don't make milk unless they get pregnant.  If you don't get pregnant, we're not going to keep you around to just eat grass.  You'll go to be processed and put in our freezer."  Of course she has no clue of what I'm telling her, but it's true.

In looking her over yesterday, I noticed something.  It is a circular wound on her side, about the size of a silver dollar.  It is a nasty looking wound, yellow and festering and flies were around it.  We quickly moved into action.  We got some iodine in a sprayer from the shelf in the feed room in the barn and sprayed the area real good.  It must burn, because Elsie didn't like that one bit.  Today, it looked a little bit better.  We sprayed more iodine on it.  Tomorrow Tricia will inspect it and put either some honey (natural antibiotic) or some Neosporin.

We will continue to watch it.  Elsie is real rambunctious.  Two mornings ago, it got in the lower 50's in the morning.  It was cool and crisp and Elsie was acting frisky, running and kicking up her heels like small calves do.  She probably ran into something and that's how she got the injury.  We try to keep our eyes open for hazards like that and as soon as we see them, we try to get them corrected.

Hopefully the iodine treatments, followed by honey and Neosporin will do the trick and heal up Elsie's bobo.  We'll post an update as things change.