The Sunday News
THIS week we change the approach a little from the usual information dissemination to a consultative one. I wish to learn from the practicing livestock farmers out there with regards to unusual experiences they encounter from their herds.
I have been a practising livestock farmer for a number of years, and I am a trained animal scientist, but I have come to appreciate that in your life as a livestock farmer at one point or another you may encounter some situations about your animals which are not readily explainable even from a textbook perspective.
I will share one such experience and hope to get answers from the broader community of cattlemen out there. In the same vein I would appreciate to learn about unusual behaviours that you encountered in your herd and how you dealt with them.
I have a heifer which calved down for the first time this year and it does not behave like most cows with young calves would do.
The first surprising behaviour we noticed about this heifer, now a cow, is that when it went out grazing it would not come back to nurse the calf, we had to search for it from the veld and drive it home to go and nurse its newly-born calf.
Ordinarily cows with calves will come back on their own to nurse the calf when the udder is recharged.
In other words when you have cows with calves you do not have the extra responsibility to be looking for them from the grazing lands to come and nurse their calves, they come back on their own, albeit in different times.
This one does not come back, in fact the other day we found it almost 24 hours later and it was grazing peacefully in the rangeland showing no intention or urgency for a need to go and nurse its calf.
The second strange behaviour which dove-tails with the one I have just described, is that even when you finally bring it home to nurse its calf, it comes in quietly, no sound of any nature to indicate that it is anxious or happy to meet its offspring.
Normally cows with calves will start vocalising (bellowing) when they approach the kraals or wherever calves are enclosed. The vocalisation can begin about 500 metres away.
This one comes in completely quiet, reluctantly approaches the calf. The other strange behaviour from this cow is that it allows the calf to nurse, but it will give it a ferocious kick when the calf head butts the udder to stimulate milk let down, like most calves would do.
As a result, we have resorted to restraining its hind legs when the calf is nursing, otherwise we feared it could seriously injure the calf with one of those kicks.
Actually, after the first head butting of the udder the cow abandons the nursing, and it becomes a struggle for the calf to nurse from the dam.
Hence our decision to restrain its hind legs until the calf has finished nursing. The udder is perfect, and it is not injured and has no signs of being inflamed, therefore I ruled out the possibility of a swollen, inflamed, and painful udder as the reason for this last behaviour.
I should, however, describe the physical disposition of this cow, as I am now strongly suspecting that there could be a correlation between its strange lack of mothering instinct and its physical built.
The cow looks like a male animal, in fact as a heifer you could easily mistake it for a steer. It is built like a male animal, and it is only the genitalia which distinguishes it as a female animal.
Could this be the reason for this strange behaviour from a first time calver? Should I expect this lack of mothering instinct to persist even during its subsequent lactations or it can self-correct?
Are there farmers out there who have experienced the same, how have you dealt with or even corrected this anomaly? What other strange behaviours have we encountered from our animals and how have we dealt with them?
Let us share our experiences so that we educate others who may not have yet met such situations so that when it does happen, they will be properly equipped with information.
Uyabonga umntaka MaKhumalo.
Mhlupheki Dube is a livestock specialist and farmer. He writes in his own capacity. Feedback [email protected] cell 0772851275
