Todd 02
Active member
Ladies and gentlemen, it seems I have royally screwed up.
We moved cattle from drought stricken West Texas to the lush pastures of Hill County last weekend. A quick check of the cattle on Monday night proved they were super happy grazing in their new home.
As often happens, life gets in the way and I didn't make it back out until first thing Saturday morning. The head count turned up about 5 short, so we immediately began searching. We found one of my favorites mommas dead and are still missing a calf.
The majority of them seem to be doing fine, but are very sluggish. Several of the older cows are wheezing and their usually loud bawling is almost muted. I have three yearling heifers and a yearling bull calf that are all stoved up in the back end and are laboring to walk. All of them are still eating, drinking, and consuming mineral.
Finding a large animal vet who does more than equine is more difficult than I expected. We have a call into one to come out and check them. We spent several hours yesterday on the phone with the vet but just aren't sure what to do until we can get him out to study them. From our conversations, it could be shipping fever, pneumonia, emphysema, nitrate poisoning, grass tetany, mineral deficiency, or even poison in the pasture. He recommends getting them off the pasture, but it's leased ground and I don't have anywhere else to go. He also recommended not moving them as additional stress could be fatal.
Until I'm able to meet with the vet, do any of you old timers on here have any home remedies? Does any of this sound familiar? As I said in my original post on the subject, I'm brand new to this. I thought I was making things better for them by moving them to more suitable pastures, but it turns out I screwed up by not conditioning them prior to releasing them on the new lush pasture. I'm getting some different mineral this afternoon to give to them.
I just hope I didn't give a death sentence to all of them. Maybe I'm not cut out for this line of work...
We moved cattle from drought stricken West Texas to the lush pastures of Hill County last weekend. A quick check of the cattle on Monday night proved they were super happy grazing in their new home.
As often happens, life gets in the way and I didn't make it back out until first thing Saturday morning. The head count turned up about 5 short, so we immediately began searching. We found one of my favorites mommas dead and are still missing a calf.
The majority of them seem to be doing fine, but are very sluggish. Several of the older cows are wheezing and their usually loud bawling is almost muted. I have three yearling heifers and a yearling bull calf that are all stoved up in the back end and are laboring to walk. All of them are still eating, drinking, and consuming mineral.
Finding a large animal vet who does more than equine is more difficult than I expected. We have a call into one to come out and check them. We spent several hours yesterday on the phone with the vet but just aren't sure what to do until we can get him out to study them. From our conversations, it could be shipping fever, pneumonia, emphysema, nitrate poisoning, grass tetany, mineral deficiency, or even poison in the pasture. He recommends getting them off the pasture, but it's leased ground and I don't have anywhere else to go. He also recommended not moving them as additional stress could be fatal.
Until I'm able to meet with the vet, do any of you old timers on here have any home remedies? Does any of this sound familiar? As I said in my original post on the subject, I'm brand new to this. I thought I was making things better for them by moving them to more suitable pastures, but it turns out I screwed up by not conditioning them prior to releasing them on the new lush pasture. I'm getting some different mineral this afternoon to give to them.
I just hope I didn't give a death sentence to all of them. Maybe I'm not cut out for this line of work...
