Hot Heifers

Bad Beezys

 We preg checked our heifers this week.  If you've never seen cattle get pregnancy checked, you're in for a real surprise.  It's not pretty.  Usually Greg, sometimes me, and in this case, a veterinarian, puts on a long glove and sticks one hand, then forearm, then elbow, then bicep, in rectally.  From there, you can feel the cervix and uterus and lots of mushy parts and sometimes even a live calf, all through the wall of the rectum.  It's messy (lots of projectile pooping), but it's the quickest, easiest, and most effective way to tell if a cow is bred.

Friday Feed Line

Heifers are a special bunch.  As young females, they're not always great at navigating a chute or our corrals.  We had a new vet here and we wanted to impress him with our bitching corral set up.  What impressed him most was the leaping ability of our young cows.  Pregnant and open cows go in separate pens and we quickly ran out of places to put our open heifers because they had crashed thorough so many fences and broke so many boards.  When they did finally get their turn in the chute, they'd lie down, back up, and were just plain uncooperative to the guy who was only trying to stick his arm up their ass.

After the 3rd jailbreak we started apologizing to the vet and swore up and down they'd never acted like this before.  It felt like taking a toddler to a nice restaurant and watching in horror as she throws her mashed potatoes at the neighboring table.  After the 5th fence crash we starting thinking about career changes.  Luckily, it ended there.  We liked the new vet as he was both helpful and didn't seem to mind a little chaos.  We had a pretty good outcome with the pregging, and found out that Dylan's fair heifer is very pregnant.  We survived to stay in ranching another day.  It couldn't have gone any better.