In an effort to ignore our guilt at putting our calves through de-horning, we spent time with the GGs, pretending to be cross at how muddy they had made themselves dabbling in puddles made by an overflowing water drinker. As you can see by the photo, this is the only way the birds get to play in any mud as the severe lack of rain means we have very very dry land and in places no grass at all. More on this tomorrow. The calves meanwhile are now both de-horned, tagged and in the case of the bull-calf, castrated. We hate having to do any of these procedures and by 'we' we mean the vet, but sadly, we have good reasons for all three: health and safety (ours and the cows), legal requirement and herd management respectively.
Of much more concern was the fact that we had masses of flies descending on both calves due to the smell of the flesh where the horn buds had been burnt off. This meant a real risk of flystrike and so we (somewhat nervously) dabbed the area with Spot-on in the hope that the flies then b** off elsewhere!!!