Let them completely heal. If you wait about 45 to 60 days, they will be gaining weight.
I would strongly suggest that you not band but surgically castrate. As many will tell you make sure you count to two before releasing band. I personally have seen the results of testicles being pushed into the abdominal cavity. It is a BIG deal o get them out. I want to share with you some data I found from the Noble Foundation in Ardmore, OK. This is cut and pasted:
During the course of conducting grazing research at the Noble Foundation, we routinely receive and "straighten out" stocker cattle. Many of these cattle are sourced from sale barns and would be considered to be at high risk for contracting bovine respiratory disease (BRD, also known as shipping fever). In the fall of 2006 and 2007, we received 858 such cattle and tracked their performance and cost on an individual animal basis through our receiving program. These cattle averaged 444 pounds when we received them; they came from sale barns in Oklahoma and Texas. Their frames were medium and large with number 1 and number 2 muscle score, and they were predominantly black- or grey-hided. Fifty-one percent of the cattle were bulls when we received them, with the remainder being steers. Nineteen percent of the cattle required dehorning.
We received them over approximately three to four weeks in each year and put them through a standard receiving protocol. The processing protocol included vaccines, implants, body weights, dehorning, etc. We castrated all the bulls, a portion of them by traditional surgical castration and the rest by banding. We also gave all the cattle an injectable antibiotic, half getting Micotil® and half getting Excede®. Following processing, we housed the cattle in a grass trap for approximately 42 days and gave them access to round bales of rye hay and 4 pounds per day of a pelleted feed. We checked the cattle every day and treated sick animals as they were identified.
We discovered several interesting trends in our data set:
1. Bulls that were banded gained less than steers (0.44 pounds per day difference), but bulls that were surgically castrated performed similarly to steers.
2. Steers that required dehorning gained 0.15 pounds per day less than cattle with no horns.
3. There was no gain difference between the two antibiotics.
