Sage’s calf is doing well except for the fact that she has not been drinking from either of Sage’s front teats and this morning they were enormous. We decided (after taking advice to check) that we needed to milk Sage out of both these quarters in order to make her a lot more comfortable. Dexters can, apparently, produce up to half a gallon of milk from one quarter per day (2.27 litres or 4 pints) and as such, that can be way too much for a newborn calf to drink. It also gives the cow a huge amount more weight to carry!! The other reason for milking Sage out was to reduce the teat size. Our hope was that this would encourage the calf to use all four because they would all be of a similar size. Really engorged teats are hard for a calf to get hold of anyway whereas if they are all similarly smaller, she will hopefully drink from all four and so keep the udder a bit more in balance during these early stages. We were fairly sure Sage would not take too kindly to be milked and so knew we would have to restrain her. The first stage was to get a halter on her which we managed by carrying the calf to the field shelter, thus ensuring she would follow, and once in, we shut the door and haltered her up. A gentle hand down to her udder in order to check her reaction, prompted a swift kick and so, as expected, we immediately moved to plan b and led her to the ‘crush’.
We had not actually used the crush before. It has been sitting in the Collecting Area all winter and as such the cows are used to its size and presence but to date, we had not ‘asked’ any of them to get into it. Using ‘natural behaviour’ as our guide, in this case, a mother’s very keen desire to stay with her new-born, we encouraged the calf towards the crush and led Sage out after her. All went surprisingly well and in a few seconds, Sage was in the crush, neck restrained and ready to be milked. We cannot say she was that happy but with her calf close by, she was not that stressed either.
It was very easy to milk her out! We did not keep the milk, at this stage of the lactation the milk still has some colostrum in and is not really fit for human consumption. We tried to see if the calf wanted to suckle once we had reduced the teat size but she was not playing ball. We had not actually seen the calf drink until this evening when an hour or so after we let her out of the crush, we went back to check on both of them and picked up the delightful slurpy sounds of a suckling youngster (albeit from a back teat)!
Fingers crossed that tomorrow, both those front teats will have had some suckling too!!