I am not sure what is more difficult to accept: The fact that our little girl is ready to have a baby or the fact that we will never again be able to go on vacation because we are about to be the proud owners of a dairy cow.
Getting a cow pregnant seems like an easy enough process. There are quite a few dairy cows in the world who manage to do it. How difficult could it be? Plenty difficult when you don't have a bull I have learned. There are no bovine bars where bulls can pick up tipsy young heifers. There is also no cowmatch.com, but there probably should be. My own experience with the mammalian mating ritual does me no good when it comes to Noelle.
We could walk her down the hill to visit with our neighbors' boys and let nature take its course, but Noelle is 3/4 Jersey and since she is smaller than many other breeds, she might have difficulty calving the first time around if she is bred with a much larger bull. Jersey Cows also produce milk with a greater buttermilk content than most breeds, thus making it the ideal milk for cheese. Since making cheese was the reason I agreed to move up to the farmette full-time, I have my heart set on another Jersey girl.
So with no Jersey bull nearby, the other option is Artificial Insemination. Our friend Jim, who is much more knowledgeable of all things farming than the husband and I are, told us that there are a plethora of AI technicians who will come impregnate our cow with any breed of bull semen, we just need to figure out when she is in heat. "How?" I ask. "There should be a noticeable discharge from her vulva."
Now, I consider myself a fairly intelligent person, I was accepted into Harvard; a fact I like to drop into conversation whenever possible such as now, but I was thoroughly and embarrassingly stumped by Jim's direction.
Where the hell is her vulva? I know where the pee comes out and I certainly know where the poop comes out because she shows me that several times a day, but her vulva? No idea. Not wanting to seem like a complete idiot, I nod in agreement, like checking her vulva discharge is something I do every day. That evening I go online to look for diagrams of a cow's anatomy. FYI, a cow's vulva is just below the rectum.
So now that I know where I am checking, I have to figure out how I am going to check. Noelle is kind of a spoiled princess. If she sees me or the husband, she comes running and wants lots of praise and ear scratching; not vulva inspection. Having her stand still long enough so I can check her backside seems like a daunting task. There must be another way to tell if she is in heat.
One website suggests that I go sit in the pasture and watch my cow's behavior. If she seems especially randy, that is a good indicator of heat. Since we don't have any other cattle it is just me and our little horse to attract Noelle's amorous advances. I have seen her mount little Cody Bear before, so I don't think I want to be sitting down when Noelle is in heat.
Lots of mooing is supposedly another indicator of heat. Now we are getting somewhere! She was doing a lot of bellowing a couple of days ago and come to think of it, she was getting a little too close behind me when I was walking up the hill to the garden. I quickly mark the date on the calendar, in hopes that I have cracked this estrous riddle . Since her cycle is about every 21 days, I will have to watch her closely in a few weeks to see if I notice the behavior again. There is a very small window (about 12 hours after first sign of heat) when AI will work.
If I get this right, I may hire myself out as the heat seeking cow maven to the stars. I am sure backyard cows are going to be the next hot commodity after backyard chickens.
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