In Which We Learn About Scours

The day began cheerily enough, with happy animals and sunny skies.

Phil went off to buy roofing for the chicken pen, and Jadon and I worked through an entire book in Spelling. Fun.

About 1pm, when Phil got home, we found what we think is the afterbirth (like a thin kombucha scobe), so that was good.

The calf, though, no longer had a clean coat. Her back half was coated with yellow dung, both from when she pooped out and then, apparently, laid in it. (Sort of like certain puppies, I suppose.)

Yellow diarrhea sounded a bit like scours, which I think I read can happen in milk cows that aren't being milked yet. The babies get too much rich cream, or something, and it messes up their digestion. Maybe like what would happen if I ate an entire cheesecake on an empty stomach. I probably COULD do it, physically, but I probably wouldn't be feeling very good afterwards.

So Phil tied Bethany up, and I milked her out. I froze the colostrum in 8oz bags, and when the time comes for lambing, I'll have six bags ready. All well and good. Hooray! Next lambing season is provided for, Phil's parents didn't have to deal with the colostrum-sick calf, Belle shouldn't be able to overeat anymore, all is well.

Or so we thought.

Two hours later, we went to try to halter train the calves. Beatrice is wily already and escaped our best attempt. Belle simply laid there while we put the halter on. Both the ones we have are way too big, so we gave up.

But she did seem awfully still.

Phil worked on a broiler pen. He had used the sawmill to make boards before the rainstorm, and then used a different saw to make 1xs and 2xs.

He found that, with such wet wood, the screws made the boards split horribly, so he used nails instead.

And I went to do some research.

My "Guide to Calving" book made me want to scream. If I had a "developmentally delayed" calf, or a calf with a cleft palate, or a calf with a broken jaw, I would now know how to help. But what normal newborn calf poop should look like? No idea. What are the causes of scours? Apparently, the author didn't much deal with that minor issue.

Internet research showed that scours may be viral, bacterial, or nutritional (maybe). Okay. Does Belle even have scours? She does have loose stools, but are they more loose than normal? And, surprise, not many people have posted photos of calf dung on the internet. None of my books had a photo either.

One site said that if the dung is piled, that is perfect. If pudding, that is mild dehydration, and if puddle (so it runs through the hay), that is extreme dehydration and very dangerous.

Belle, then, had mild dehydration. I made up a batch of electrolytes from a recipe online.

And here was one small miracle for me. I haven't had corn syrup in the house for probably about eight years. For our family reunion, though, I wanted to try making marshmallows for homemade rocky road. I have never liked rocky road ice cream, so why that sounded like a good idea is a bit of a mystery. Perhaps making marshmallows from scratch was a new and unique challenge.

Well, the marshmallows were an abysmal failure. I didn't buy enough cornstarch, so substituted powdered sugar. So they were twice as sweet as they should have been. I forgot the vanilla flavoring, so they had no taste but sugar. And their texture was moist and runny, rather than dry and squishy. Oh, well.

But that slightly used bottle of corn syrup that I picked up for the marshmallows made it back to my house.

So when the time came for me to make electrolytes (4 C. water, 5 t. white corn syrup, 1 t. salt, 3/4 t. baking soda), I could do it without trouble. Calves, apparently, can't process sugar. Corn syrup, though, they can do.

A skeptic would probably say that's just a nice coincidence, but there is really no reason I would have a desire to make a food I don't even like, and take home the leftover bottle of a syrup I haven't used in almost a decade. I'd call that a miracle.

Immediately after squirting a quart of the electrolytes into her throat, Belle stood up for the first time in hours, expelled a large amount of dung (which, sadly, had bloody clots: is it normal calf "new digestion" issues or clostridium? Ah! How can one tell?!).

She ran over and nursed from her mother, which I don't think should happen immediately after the electrolytes, but I was just happy she was standing. She frisked around for a little while before laying back down.

This whole thing, though, had me enough freaked out to check on her this evening. Her ears were cold, which is a bad sign. The hay she was resting on was still quite damp (six inches of rain doesn't wear off in a day); her mother was ruminating some distance away, which offered no extra body heat.

So Phil and I agreed that she should come inside.

We moved aside a corner of the rug, and pushed the coffee table on its side at a triangle with the wardrobe and bookcase. Feed bags, then the dry sawdust Phil produced today, and some dry hay from Tyson (delivered tonight), and the dung-encrusted, stinky baby came to visit. (Stinky only in the physical; in spirit, she is extremely sweet.)

I dosed her with garlic and homeopathic arnica, spent twenty minutes trying to soak off the disgusting dung tags that had made her tail a solid mass, and then gave her a pint of electrolyte solution.

She isn't comatose, or anything near it. She holds her head up, and stood up for a while when we first brought her in. But I wouldn't say she's the picture of health, and I'm happy she's in a dry, fairly warm, draft-free place.