Had a wreck last year at branding time because of selenium. All the calves get a selenium shot before they go to grass (we live in an area with very low selenium) as a way of giving them an extra boost for the summer.
Started to notice strange behaviour in one of the first bunch of calves that was processed: kept laying down, then wouldn't get up at all, was kicking at his neck, and within 40 minutes he was dead! I thought, 'What the hell? And by then we had moved onto the second batch of calves and noticed two more calves that wouldn't get up. Within the hour they had also died.
Well, I feeling pretty upset, you know, sleepness nights through calving season, treating calves that had got sick, getting slow goers sucking, all that jazz, and here three of my calves are mysteriously dead on branding day- two weeks before they go on grass! I was swearing off roping them, thought maybe they'd been handled too rough and stressed down, just basically pulling my hair trying to figure out what had happened.
One of my neighbours who had helped with the day felt so stumped about it that he mentioned it to his brother in law (a large animal vet) and he solved the mystery:
Turns out that one person on my ground crew hadn't been paying close enough attention to where the shot was being given. You see, we always like to give shots in the neck (in the triangle of it above the jugular groove and below the top of the neck), it's prevents developing abcesses in the more valuable meat of the hip. Well, apparently if you give a calf a shot of selenium in the jugular vein, the animal will be dead before you can withdraw the needle. What happened to my calves was that the shot was too close to the jugular, which was also fatal, just took the calves around 45-60 minutes to die from it.
An expensive lesson for me, as my entire income for a year is from my calves, and from what you posted, I'm kind of wondering it that didn't happen to you.
Take care.
