I learned something new...

[milkmaid]

Thought you folks might find this interesting. ;-)

I stopped by the vet clinic last night to pick up some drugs I'd ordered in. My vet there specializes in horses and cows...or more specifically, equine and bovine reproduction. You name it, he does it.

He had a cow there he was working on and I stopped to watch. You folks would have liked her, I think. Big herford cow, lot of length, lot of width, and a lot of depth. I asked about her... she'd been at the clinic for 3 months, vet had tried about everything and she still wouldn't get pregnant. He keeps quite a few clients animals - he's kept mine a time or two. He charges $3/day for feed and board, so that times 90 days is a $270 vet bill right there. Someone must really like that cow.

Anyhow, what they were doing at the moment was flushing her. They'd AI'd her 7 days prior, and they wanted to know if she was producing a good embryo or not. In the meantime my vet explained all her other problems.

She had a torn cervix and adhesion tags on the uterus. How? she'd gotten in with the neighbor's bull (or vica versa) and her owner had aborted the calf. Vet said the calf was too far along and they would have done better to just let the cow have the calf. He suggested the torn cervix was from too big a calf and/or cervix not dialated (lutalyse - forced abortion).

Here I am thinking "too far along" would mean a ~5 month old calf. After all, the bottle of lutalyse does say you can use it up to 100 days of pregnancy. (However, the important words following that statement are "in feedlot cattle"!) Vet said the calf was about 2 1/2 to 3 months, or 75-90 days, and that was too far along.

So they finished with her and went to look for an embryo under the microscope. If there was a good one they'd assume she couldn't maintain a pregnancy because of the torn cervix. If there wasn't a good embryo then there was several reasons for that. If there was no embryo, then they'd figure it wasn't getting from the ovary to the uterus...and there's nothing you can do to solve that problem but the salebarn.

He looked and looked...no embryo anywhere. I know where that cow's headed.

I guess I found two lessons there. 1) You can't/shouldn't abort a calf that far along and in this case, regardless of what type of bull she messed with it really wasn't worth it to abort that calf. And, of course, 2) Don't ever buy an open cow at the local auction. :lol:

 

[sidney411]

I learned something new too, thanks for sharing. I did not realize that a 2 1/2 to 3 mth fetus would be large enough to do damage passing.

 

[ollie']

Milkmaid I would almost bet that if the cows ovary had a CL , she produced an embryo.
I have seen several cows flushed (single egged) where the embryo was never found. They can stick to the catheter, filter,dish, etc. In some cases they never get the lone embryo out of the uterus. If I were the cow owner , after flushing , I would try to breed her . Sometimes they will get pregnant after a flush with no drugs where they wouldn't before. I owned a cow that was getting old. We single egged her , no egg found. I told the embryologist to abort her. He said no reason to the cow didn't produce an egg. She calved 9mos later. She had a heifer calf. That heifer calf went on to raise a bull calf that was calf champion at a well known show. Just goes to show you never know whether your luck is good or bad. Count your blessings , not your luck.

 

[Workinonit Farm]

Milkmaid, thankyou for sharing that information. I learned something new too. It makes sense that a cow, 5 months into pregnancy, would be too far along to intentionally abort, but 2 1/2 months along being too far along, didn't know that.

Katherine

 

[Scotty]

I hope that person the other day took the advise on his show cow. I always figured after three months it would be jsut like nine months.


Scotty

 

[cypressfarms]

Me too Scotty,

Just doesn't seem right to abort just because you want to show when the cow's so far along.

 

[Mahoney Pursley Ranch]

I don't get it when people do those types of things. If the cow had the calf she would be healthy now,able to calf again and have a calf to take to the sale barn to boot. :roll:

 

[msscamp]

I hope that person the other day took the advise on his show cow. I always figured after three months it would be jsut like nine months.


Scotty

I hope he did, too.

Milkmaid, thanks for posting this. I learned something new today because of it! ;-)

 

[milkmaid]

You're welcome, folks. ;-) Just figured you all might be interested...I know it had interested me.

Ollie, I considered that aspect too, but I watched the cow being flushed and with the amount they ran through her, and then the amount of fluid they flushed the filter etc with, I don't think that embryo was stuck anywhere. And seeing as she'd been at the clinic 3 months, and who-knows-how-long her owners had attempted to get her bred... there's evidently some major problems with that cow, regardless of what might have happened with the embryo that day. LOL.