EMERGENCY!!! Whats going on?????

[yuppiecowboy]

You need to remind yourself of a couple things here. first of all cattle die. Especially trying to be born. It stinks and even when you do everything right they still die. That is a fact that has to be dealt with by you or animal husbandry may lend itself to an endless supply of heartache for you.

Secondly, no matter how long you are in the livestock business you will be second guessing your decisions. In all manners of life we heve forks in our road and decisions to be made, and the best we can do is make our decisions as prudently as possible with the information, experience, and wisdom we have at hand. We use Veterinarians to make the decisions of our animals care due to their knowledge and training. They are not infallible, and mistakes have been known to happen. And thats in people docs, or any profession for that matter, as well. However they do the best they can with the information they have to work with but the fact remains sometimes animals just die.

I am a big believer in not getting excited until its time to get excited, but remember if we "left it up to mother nature" we wouldnt have vets and we wouldnt have any animals due to the hoof and mouth plague.

I too, often liken my vet to a football coach who would win every game if he would do what I screamed at him through the tv set, but hindsight is easy and when I am in a jam I still let the vet call the play on fourth down.

 

[OH Breeder]

Reno,
We had an extremely difficult calving season. After a couple of births we knew that the clean up bull and the cows were contributing to high birthweights and the shape of the calves were tough for delivery. We asked our vet to come and palpate all the remaining cows. We induced two and I am glad we did. One turned out to be twins that were both at 80#'s yet premature. The other was a 98# chunk. I have induced in the past and would do it again. We have not had retained placentas and our cows responded well to the inductions. I as everyone else believe this is a personal choice. I also have had the cows ultrasounded for term. When you only run 10 or more cows two loss's kill your ratio's. Look at every decision as a learning experience. Unfortunately the outcome no one could have anticipated, but the next go around you will have  better handle on what to do. Not the best way to learn. You have my sympathy.
OH B

 

[LazyGLowlines]

Reno....don't beat yourself up.  You did what you thought was the best thing for the heifer and calf.  You were the one who could see the heifer and make the final decision whether to take her in or not.  And as DL mentioned it could be that you would've had a bigger wreck if you hadn't taken her in.  So please accept our condolences on the loss of the calf.