A Little Bit At a Time

Dairy cows are a lot different from beef cattle.  Dairy cows' bodies are lean with bones showing as their energy goes to produce milk.  Beef cattle are muscular, bulky since their energy goes to produce beef.  I've found that dairy cows' hooves need trimming often, whereas we never trim beef cattle hooves. 

Every six months it seems that it is time to do it again.  The hooves show signs of lengthening and if you let it go too long, they'll either begin to limp or you'll notice that the longest part of the hoof will break and eventually fall off.  Hoof trimming seems to be not a pleasant experience for the cows.  We try to do it a little at a time since it is less traumatic for the animals and less exhausting for us.  The front feet are the easiest, so we start there. 

We keep the animal's head securely tied and I simply pull one of the front feet up, resting it on my leg and bending it at her knee.  That gives you a good vantage point to see what needs to be done.

The first thing I notice is... wow, I have a lot of grey hair!  What is happening to me?  Let's focus on Rosie's hoof.  The first thing I'm looking for is a smell.  If it smells bad, the animal has hoof rot.  We generally treat with a product called hoof 'n heel, but have also used Coppertox and iodine.  In Rosie's case, we smelled nothing.  There didn't appear to be a stick or anything caught between her hooves.

I don't have fancy equipment.  In fact, I use tin snips that I bought at a hardware store.  They are really used for cutting through galvanized tin.  They seem to do the job on hooves, I've found.  I've looked at purchasing a rasp, nippers, and a hoof knife, but so far, the tin snips are doing the job.  Before I begin cutting, I use a knife to scrape dirt and mud out from under the hoof.  Once this is gone it really shows me what I must do.  The first thing is to cut the ridges on the outside edge of the hoof.  We go really slow and try not to clip off everything needed at one time.  Slow and steady.  Then I'll cut the ends of the hoof where they tend to grow out to a point.  Again, slow and a little bit at a time. 

Cows don't really enjoy this process.  It doesn't hurt them, but they don't like to be messed with.  They often pull away.  This job takes persistence.  It is hard on the back, though, so we generally try to get one front hoof done each evening,  So far, we've gotten both Rosie and Luna' front hooves. 

The back hooves are a different story.  Cows will kick the fool out of you with their back hooves.  We generally try to wait until they are sitting down and we'll sneak up and rub their necks and then begin clipping.  They don't let us get much done before they stand up.  Hoof trimming takes great patience and perseverance.  You have to be content with just getting a little at a time done.  If you are patient, sooner or later, you'll get the job done.

Thinning Things Out

My hair is getting more and more gray with each passing day.  I'm okay with it and haven't considered hair products to color the grey.  On the bright side, at least for now, although it is turning grey, it hasn't started turning loose.  It is still thick and when I go get a haircut, the barber often pulls out some thinning shears like shown below to thin things out a bit.

Image Credit

I thought of the haircut analogy the other day when I started an undertaking in trimming one of our live oak trees.  It had a lot of interior growth that just needed to be cleaned up. A friend of ours had his live oaks trimmed and the price tag was way more than what I wanted to fork over, so I started trimming this tree and it will take me about a week or so of plugging away at it before I get it completed, but I made a good start.

Of course I did a lot of googling of how to properly trim a live oak.  Here's a little bit of what I learned:

1. Don't trim flush with the limb or you'll take off the collar that helps your tree scab over and heal,
2. Take off all the dead and diseased limbs,
3. Remove any lower limbs that are growing upward to the crown as this will help airflow,
4. Cut away branches that rub together,
5. Trim off 'ugly' looking branches. (Oh, I have one more thing I'll show you at the end that I learned by making a mistake!)

I used a big extension ladder to get myself up where I needed to be to trim with a chain saw, a pole saw, and and hand saw.  The ladder was equally effective in getting me up high as well as making my wife nervous.  I'm not afraid of heights.

Unlike my wife, the cows, goats, and chickens were pleased with my new project because I threw the limbs I trimmed over the fence and the animals ate the leaves and the chickens found bugs and such to eat amongst the leaves and branches.

In THIS POST and another post referenced in that  one, I tell of  how we repaired this live oak that had split down the middle by cabling it together.  You can see a cable spanning a two of the large limbs and pulled tight with a turnbuckle in the photo below:

After a recent storm I noticed that one of the two cables supporting the great weight of the mighty oak had come loose.

I quickly diagnosed the problem - the weight of the tree pulling against the turnbuckle had straightened out one of the hooks, allowing the turnbuckle to release from the eye bolt anchored in the tree.  I'll need t fix that as we are smack dab in the middle of  hurricane season and I don't want to leave the tree vulnerable.

Okay, back to the lesson I learned the hard way.  When you make a cut, you are supposed to paint the fresh cut with some black spray paint.  Newly cut wood is sweet smelling and attracts bugs that will bore into your tree, introducing disease. Painting the cut helps to reduce the risk of bug damage.

You can see my mistake at the seven o'clock position in the photo below.  Rather than doing what I knew to do and make my first cut at the bottom of the limb, I cut from the top. With no bottom cut, the weight of the cut limb tore some of the bark off of the bottom.  That could have been eliminated, but the tree will heal.  I'll just do it right from this point forward.

With the tree trimming about 50% done on this live oak, I think it looks a lot cleaner  and opened up the view under the expansive canopy that just makes the tree look better.  It should also allow a little more sunlight that will perk up the St. Augustine grass that grows beneath the tree's branches.  We all benefit from a little thinning out from time to time.

Diagnosing Rosie's Hoof Problem

The first five months of this year proved to be very wet for us with above-average rainfall, even by South Louisiana standards.  While wreaking havoc on our garden, the animals suffered as well in mud and pasture conditions that were more suitable for frogs, ducks, and alligators than for livestock. I can remember hearing about a condition that soldiers in Viet Nam suffered from called 'Jungle Rot.' It was caused by soldiers walking through swampy, tropical areas and not changing their socks. This allowed bacteria to flourish and caused severe pain and difficulty to their feet.

Believe it or not, it's not just soldiers that suffer from this condition.  Our cows got a similar condition due to the wet environment.  In livestock it is called Foot Rot.  A bacteria called Fusobacterium necrophorum lives especially in the mud around hay rings and attacks the animal's hooves, or more specifically, the soft tissue between the toes.  It becomes red, swollen, and causes some necrosis.  It is not pleasant.  You can smell it.  There's a reason it is called foot rot.

Rosie contracted this due to the environmental conditions and was in pain, limping around all day back in late April.  As a result, she wasn't able to get around good to eat grass - grass she needed to develop the calf in her belly.  Although we don't like to give our cows antibiotics since we drink the milk, we had dried off Rosie two months in advance of her due date (June 18th), and there was no risk in giving her medicine that could be transferred to us in the milk.  We gave her a dose of a broad spectrum antibiotic called LA300 and in a few days, she was perfectly fine.

Well, guess what?  Now the ground has pretty much dried up and we notice that Rosie is limping again on her front hoof.  There is no smell and there is no sign of necrotic tissue or swelling. It is not foot rot.  She walks around gingerly, eating a bit and then sitting down.  Not good, especially with a baby coming soon.

My feet hurt!

So what is it?  Tricia fired up the "Google machine" and discovered what Rosie's ailment is: Laminitis.  Laminitis is a metabolic disorder of the hooves that affects about 80% of dairy cows.  It is triggered by the calving process, occurring 7-10 days before calving and continuing 7-10 days after calving.  Hormonal and nutritional changes are prevalent around calving time and Rosie has always been more susceptible to this type of thing - whether laminitis or ketosis.  We really have to watch her. She's fat right now and in great condition for calving, but she tends to be susceptible to odd things like this.

Fat as a pig!

The primary thing that you can do to prevent laminitis is trimming.  They recommend trimming 3 times a year.  This is easier said than done.  These animals are relatively small compared with other cows, but still weigh between 800 - 900 pounds.  They don't like you to mess with their hooves.  May I mention that trying to lift and trim their back hooves is not safe and invokes kicks that could leave you hurt or dead.

Our local Cattlemen's Association has a stall on wheels, hydraulically powered that, once the animal's feet are bound, will tilt sideways, allows you to trim the hoofs safely.  We have called a gentleman to come do this service for us several years ago.  This is not recommended for pregnant animals, though, so you must schedule around their pregnancies.  Here's a picture of this contraption I found on the Internet:

Image Credit

Without being able to use that device, I tied Rosie to a pecan tree and lifted both of her front feet (I'm not going near her back feet - those are the business end of the cow, trust me!) and using clippers, I've been able to trim both front hooves a bit, but she still needed more trimming to take off the excess hoof causing her pain. Over the past week, we've resorted to trying to sneak up on them while they were sitting down and quickly snip off a piece here and a piece there, trying to achieve the cuts shown in the diagram below before they stand up.  They've become leery of us walking in the pasture.  I hide the clippers in my back pocket!

Image Credit

Slowly, but surely, we were able to get the (front) hooves about where they need to be.  The first day after doing this, Rosie was worse!  Then she started to improve and by yesterday, she was barely limping at all.  By the end of December, all three cows will have calved, and then we will try to call out the gentleman to bring the tilting squeeze shoot for a more professional pedicure.  As Old Benjamin Franklin said, "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!"

Lili's first trip to the Barber Shop

I can't really remember my first haircut.  I do remember getting haircuts as a kid, though.  For some reason, I can remember sitting on a booster seat type thing like below (not my picture - it's one I found in the Internet) that was laid across the armrests to lift me up so it wouldn't be so uncomfortable for the barber to trim my hair.

Image Credit

I also remember the smells in the barbershop and seeing black combs soaking in some blue liquid in a glass container.  As a college student, I remember the LSU Union had an old time barbershop and I loved going to get a clipper cut with the #2 guards on the clippers.  The best part of the cut was at the end, when the barber would shave my neck with a straight razor and real shave cream.  Then he would reach into a white box that looked like a small refrigerator and pull out a hot moist towel and wipe the back of my neck.  Oh man!

The haircut I'm talking about today is not as nice or nostalgic.  It is getting to be time for the livestock shows and Benjamin is going to be showing Rosie and Lili in the Jefferson Davis Parish Livestock Show.  As a result, we must clip their winter coats off.  I know.  It sounds cruel to do this to them when it is so cold.  I assume that livestock shows were originally scheduled in the winter because it was the slow time of the year for farmers and they could attend shows that wouldn't conflict with planting or harvesting.

We don't keep our animals specifically for the livestock shows.  We like the fresh milk they give us.  But showing livestock is a nice learning experience in responsibility for the kids and gives them an opportunity to win some awards and travel a little bit.  We have a pair of Andis livestock clippers that do a pretty good job of trimming the coats off of the cows and every year we get them out and do our best to trim the girls.  They don't particularly like it, but neither did I when I was younger.

Can you take a little off the top?

I'm not much of a barber, but I do the best job I can.  We take the bulk of their coats off with the big clippers shown above and then we do the fine tuning with a smaller pair that allows us to get in the hard-to-get areas.  When done, we pull the blades off and bring them to the Feed Store as there is a gentleman that sharpens them back up so they'll be ready next year when we trim again.  He can also work on the clippers and fix them if they break.

As I stated, it is not an enjoyable experience for the girls, especially when we trim their heads and ears.  The noise annoys them and so does the vibration.  To trim their heads you must remove the halters and hold them steady with a nose clamp that looks similar to the one below.  They don't much like that.  I wouldn't either. Before long, though, the haircut is over and both of us are relieved.

Image Credit

You can really see the difference that the clipper makes.  At first the cows and calves are all wild and woolly, but once trimmed, they are shiny and sleek and ready for the shows.

Finish the job, Barber

We generally trim them a couple weeks before the show.  Inexperienced barbers, such as myself, often mess up and need the 'forgiveness' that a couple of weeks of hair growth will give you!  Lili is looking mighty nice with her new 'do.'  You can still see the green ink in her ear from the tattoo we gave her couple of Saturdays ago.

Lili is looking spiffy!

She looks a lot different without her winter coat, doesn't she?