Parlayzed in Rear Legs

Help Support CattleToday:

Smith1000

Active member
Joined
Feb 27, 2006
Messages
30
Reaction score
0
Location
Kansas
Last Wednesday, had a cow (hereford) prolapse when calving. Calf died. This would have been her first calf. Vet stitched her up, but her rear legs are still paralyzed. I moved her to the barn Friday. Have been lifting her daily with the tractor bucket and a makeshift sling. Have her on antibiotics and ibuprofen. Have kept her propped up for the most part. She seems to be healing up some. When raised up, she will get her front legs under her. She can feel pain in the rear legs. One leg seems worse. She will occasionally move the legs, but just can't seem to get them going. She is eating good and drinking lots of water. When raised, she drains a lot. This seems to help her quite a bit. Guess I'll keep her going for a couple of weeks to see if her legs come back. Any advice or anything I should give her? Someone said to give her a vitamin B shot. Seems like that nerve should regenerate after awhile.
 
Smith,

About 3 years ago, I had a 1st time hefier that layed down in the woods to calve. When I fould her several hours later, calf was half out and dead. Pull calf, but cow was paralized. I worked with her about 24 hours doing the tractor sling thing. Nothing worked, but she did make good hamburger though.

Good Luck.
 
Smith1000":24bmwn0q said:
Have kept her propped up for the most part. She seems to be healing up some. When raised up, she will get her front legs under her. She can feel pain in the rear legs. One leg seems worse. She will occasionally move the legs, but just can't seem to get them going. She is eating good and drinking lots of water. When raised, she drains a lot. This seems to help her quite a bit. Guess I'll keep her going for a couple of weeks to see if her legs come back. Any advice or anything I should give her? Someone said to give her a vitamin B shot. Seems like that nerve should regenerate after awhile.
'

I would keep helping her along for awhile yet. As long as she is eating and drinking well, and otherwise healthy I would give her a chance. We have had them take a week or more, and then again we have had to put them down too.

Randi
 
Smith1000":2tgt3m4t said:
Last Wednesday, had a cow (hereford) prolapse when calving. Calf died. This would have been her first calf. Vet stitched her up, but her rear legs are still paralyzed. I moved her to the barn Friday. Have been lifting her daily with the tractor bucket and a makeshift sling. Have her on antibiotics and ibuprofen. Have kept her propped up for the most part. She seems to be healing up some. When raised up, she will get her front legs under her. She can feel pain in the rear legs. One leg seems worse. She will occasionally move the legs, but just can't seem to get them going. She is eating good and drinking lots of water. When raised, she drains a lot. This seems to help her quite a bit. Guess I'll keep her going for a couple of weeks to see if her legs come back. Any advice or anything I should give her? Someone said to give her a vitamin B shot. Seems like that nerve should regenerate after awhile.

If you use the search option above you will find some interesting threads about this.
 
Thanks to all for the advice. She seemed better today. Gave her a couple of B complex shots. Had her in the air for about 30 minutes and she was moving around fairly well while in the sling. She is moving her rear legs some. She can't get her rear feet out to stand on though. She will push them back some after being up awhile. Her left knee looks swollen too. She is eating and drinking quite a bit. Guess I'll just keep doing what I'm doing for awhile. She is healing up well otherwise.
 
In my 25 years of messing with cows, I have found that very few every get back up. Maybe 1 out of 100. If she's not up in a week, go ahead and dispose of her
 
Thought I would follow-up on this. She lasted about 2 weeks, but never got up. Even when raised with the bucket, she never was able to put much weight on the rear legs. She got worse and worse and just wanted to frog her rear legs out and lay on her belly. Finally had to put her down. In addition she had developed an infection in one of her front knees.
 
Thanks for the update. SO many people never give us audate and we are left hanging wondering what the out come was. Sorry about your cow, but if your going to have them your going to lose them at some time or another. At least you were able and did try to help her.
 
Smith1000":23xcxg7i said:
Last Wednesday, had a cow (hereford) prolapse when calving. Calf died. This would have been her first calf. Vet stitched her up, but her rear legs are still paralyzed. I moved her to the barn Friday. Have been lifting her daily with the tractor bucket and a makeshift sling. Have her on antibiotics and ibuprofen. Have kept her propped up for the most part. She seems to be healing up some. When raised up, she will get her front legs under her. She can feel pain in the rear legs. One leg seems worse. She will occasionally move the legs, but just can't seem to get them going. She is eating good and drinking lots of water. When raised, she drains a lot. This seems to help her quite a bit. Guess I'll keep her going for a couple of weeks to see if her legs come back. Any advice or anything I should give her? Someone said to give her a vitamin B shot. Seems like that nerve should regenerate after awhile.

I will give you credit for trying if you are prolapsing you could have a mineral problem she might not be the only one.
I have never saved one I didn't get up in a few days.
Does she have the look and if she does innoculate with a 44 cal.
If she is fighting she has a chance as long as she is in that mode.
It gets down to you are responsible, for her condition is she suffering or not and making the responsible decision.
Can't loose if you ain't got em.
 
had one get down after she calved, we stayed down with her till late that night, to keep the wolves away, my husband got back up around 4 that mornin, he decided she had rested up some and worked on gettin her up, she wanted to get up, but her back end just didnt want too cooperate, he got her on her front legs, and used the hot shot on the area just below her tail, she did finally stand and got up, but he had to walk behind her and hold her tail up and balance her,if he let go she would start going down, finally after several hours, she "walked it off" she didnt have a prolaps, her hind end didnt want to work. to bad that ya lost em both.

samm
 
I had a heifer that had a 85 pound calf. Calf died, but the heifer is fine. She was partialy paralyzed for about two days. Thanks Kaneranch
 
we had this happen to about 25-30 hereford heifers, we had 3 Angus bulls get in with them as they where growing they may of been 10-12 months old when the bulls got in a paddock with 50+ heifers we lost a few .we had a hip clamp that we put on the front of the tractor to pick them up,and try and get movement in there legs, problem is when they lie down and cant get up they stop the blood flow to the leg the heifer is lying on, we found this only happened with heifers that get joined to a bull to early, never join a heifer to a bull that is under 16 mths. ;-)
 
topsquar":2bevpb4z said:
we had this happen to about 25-30 hereford heifers, we had 3 Angus bulls get in with them as they where growing they may of been 10-12 months old when the bulls got in a paddock with 50+ heifers we lost a few .we had a hip clamp that we put on the front of the tractor to pick them up,and try and get movement in there legs, problem is when they lie down and cant get up they stop the blood flow to the leg the heifer is lying on, we found this only happened with heifers that get joined to a bull to early, never join a heifer to a bull that is under 16 mths. ;-)

You had 30 paralyzed? If so do you know how many got back up and how many you had to put down?
 
we lost 15-18 that i can remember, then my father thought someone must of stolen some because we had some that went missing that we latter found, problem was they would go hide in the tea tree bushes to calve,tea tree grows very thick in the gullies,
which made getting the tractor to them very hard. ;-)
 
Hi. New to board not new to ranching. We had a downed cow three years ago. She hadn't calved. Gave her Norcal, intra and into sub. She was close to calving. Vet told us (if we wanted to take the time) to lift her each day with hip clamps on a backhoe, keep water and food for her, and when she got close we gave her athe med that sent her into labor. She had the calf while down. We'd lift her twice a day the calf (extremely spunky!!) nursed. The calf soon learned to nurse while she was down. The cow could stand when we lifted her and stood only with hip clamp but put pressure on all legs eventually. We did it for one month with lots of negative advice from other rancher friends. The usual was "What's your time worth, anyway?" Or, "You're wasting your time, she'll die anyway." We decided, since we have only 140 head, our job was the animal, if it was in trouble, first and foremost. Not new fences, not building a corral not, well, you get the point (Although it took us only 45 minutes each time to tend to her). It's pretty rare to have lots of animal problems at once unless you're a bigger outfit than we are. Anyway, the cow got so's she'd get mad when she'd hear the machine coming for her. So she got a little on the fight and I think it helped. It also helped to have a calf to worry about. I think the post where someone said they put a leppy calf in with a downed cow was really creative and thinking outside the box. She and her calf walked around the herd one month later.
Hope this helps someone and I say all this out of deep respect for all cattle ranchers.
It doesn't always turn out okay but it did for us this time. Just took a little longer.
 
We lost a cow earlier in the week, when we found her she was down and had her head stuck in our fence. I would guess that she laid down to chew her cud and rolled back to stretch and caught her head, nothing else makes any better sense. The angle she was at she needed to pull her head horizontal to get it out of the fence then roll to get up - I don't think she physically could do that with the ground angle. We got her moved and sitting up and I spent all day trying to get her to stand, packing her water, etc. She didn't seem to be in pain, just weak and uncoordinated, the vet said we'd probably have to lift her with the tractor to get her legs back underneath her. We tried that night but she fought us more than tried to really stand so we left her and she was sitting up and drinking good. She didn't make it through the night. Obviously something else was happening or had happened during her "down" time in the fence. Her calf nursed every chance he got while she was down - he is probably four weeks old now. Major bummer, she was one of my best cows. We decided that we'd bottle feed the calf so I made a couple bottles and went down to the field. We looked and looked and couldn't find him. Lo and behold he was right where I started looking, EXCEPT he was happily nursing on one of my heifers through the "back door". I wouldn't mind if he was nursing on one of the older cows who could feed two but of course they wouldn't cooperate. So we brought the calf home with another cow that lost her calf about three weeks ago because she was kind of keeping an eye on him. Just on a whim we decided to see if she had any milk, she did, and though we have to put her in the chute to make her hold still she lets him nurse and her milk seems to be slowly coming back. I won't believe it until I see her let him nurse on his own but maybe by the end of the weekend...
 
Hi. Well, our cow did well eating and drinking but stayed on her chest, only squirming around. She kept getting her back legs stretched out behind her and not tucked in as they should be. Always a bad sign. We'd lift her everyday but after a couple of minutes trying to stand on her front feet she'd flop head down. She never could get one leg to hold her in the back so we think it was unable to. We were going to give her a fighting chance because miracles do happen. We had to save her again one morning when we found her on her side and bloating but we got her on her chest and she expelled lots of air through her mouth and started eating again. But in the middle of the night on the sixth day she got on her side again after squirming trying to get up, we supposed, and we didn't get to her in time and she died. The dirt around her told the story. She tried hard for a long time. We were going to give her lots of time (lifting her everday) as long as she was eating and drinking and staying on her chest. We figured it took us only a half hour a day to care for her and we looked at her many times as we passed by her, checking on her, so it was worth it. But it's still a hard thing to lose a cow who tries so hard and who can't understand why her body won't work. Heck dang.
 
Paulette":2jq8w5oj said:
Hi. Well, our cow did well eating and drinking but stayed on her chest, only squirming around. She kept getting her back legs stretched out behind her and not tucked in as they should be. Always a bad sign. We'd lift her everyday but after a couple of minutes trying to stand on her front feet she'd flop head down. She never could get one leg to hold her in the back so we think it was unable to. We were going to give her a fighting chance because miracles do happen. We had to save her again one morning when we found her on her side and bloating but we got her on her chest and she expelled lots of air through her mouth and started eating again. But in the middle of the night on the sixth day she got on her side again after squirming trying to get up, we supposed, and we didn't get to her in time and she died. The dirt around her told the story. She tried hard for a long time. We were going to give her lots of time (lifting her everday) as long as she was eating and drinking and staying on her chest. We figured it took us only a half hour a day to care for her and we looked at her many times as we passed by her, checking on her, so it was worth it. But it's still a hard thing to lose a cow who tries so hard and who can't understand why her body won't work. Heck dang.

I been kind of on the fence on the down cow thing up till now. We had one last year we messed with for a few days and in the end had to shoot. But after reading your post, I will not ever deal with this I will take Caustics and Bez's advice and put a bullet in them, no reason for an animal to suffer like that one of yours did.
 

Latest posts

Top