All Got up Except One Calf
The gut had twisted and the small intestine had gone black, and the large intestine was red and distended with air, maybe the gas has started to blow it up as it had been dead over night.
You may have read my blog twins twins twins, well looking back now I totally regret turning them out on a "home" field, it runs along the back of the village houses and also the village pub. As with all country pubs they are having a bad time, and last night the publican threw a last fling party and later as it went dark brought out his boxes of fireworks. I could hear some of them going off in our house, particularly a firework the spits a banger high in the air every four or five seconds a dozen times, and explodes about forty foot up in the air.
This morning (8th June 2009)I went to look round the stock and went into this "home field", all four cows and six calves were laying down not twenty five yard from the pub, all got up except one calf, and that was lying flat out. It was dead, a huge five week old black Hereford cross bull calf, it was clean, no marks on it, no bite marks, no sense of stress to it at all. After speaking to the vet about possible poisoning, with yew or some other garden hedges that are evergreen, or the possibility of whether it has eaten lawn mowings, (I know that will kill horses) we came to the conclusion the best thing was to take it to the hunt kennels and get them to open it up.
It was dually opened up only to find that all the small intestine had gone black, and the large intestine was red and distended with air, maybe the gas has started to blow it up as it had been dead over night. However it looked as though it had got a twisted gut, and the one section was dead, we looked at the stomach contents, it was full of grass, in of the other stomachs was full of milk already looking like a ball of cheese, it had been eating and drinking right up to the point of when it twisted its guts.
It was a 90/100 kg calf, five weeks old, health and growing fast, and it was a twin, in the market it would be in excess of two hundred and fifty pounds. We cannot prove it was the fireworks that triggered it of, but the co incidents was their,
On most of the occasions the publican tells us of any firework display, so we can move stock and ponies away from the adjacent fields, but he let these off on impulse ,(or could it be malicious). We will never know, but I will be very careful not to put very young stock in that field again.
Like I have been told from my very early days of farming "where you've got livestock, you've got dead stock".
Thought at the time that it was too good to be true to have three sets of twins in one year, and be well up on my calf/cow ratio.
But that's life.