A Lame Cow on the Ranch

hi I'm Mike welcome back to our wiing life where today we actually have to deal with a lame cow we've got a cow out there in the field who's got a bad leg and we're going to bring her into the shoots take a look at her and see what we can do to help her out it's coming up today on our Wyoming [Music] life all righty guys we have a little bit of a challenge today that you're going to come along and help me with and that is that we do have a lame cow number 130 she's about a 10-year-old cow and she's having a few problems what our plan is for today is to head out with the four-wheeler and find her I know where she's at I actually tried to feed them in didn't work uh that's one of the problems when we have such nice weather in December is the cows want to be cows they want to be out on pasture and right now they're on a 400 acre pasture that we call the Home pasture and they don't think they need food so feeding them is not a regular one one a day thing right now um we actually feed them about every other day usually they come in today they decided they didn't want to so we have to go to [Music] them [Music] one thing that we do have going for us is that we have a few decoy cows here I call them that because when we bring in the rest of the herd the hope is that they're going to see them now these are our younger cows these guys saw me come in with food they came running uh Bambi's in there with them because apparently she's some sort of babysitter or something um but the cow that we need is not in here it was kind of my hope that she would be but of course you know laws of percentages and Murphy's Law and all that stuff she's still pretty far back they did see me come in with food so there is a chance they could be working this way but we're going to have to go back and take a look at her and uh get behind her and kind of move her in this is what we call the lot it's about 3 acres as compared to 400 Acres makes it a whole lot easier to sort off cows and I've found over time that if you bring in the whole herd it is easier to get those cows sorted off I've tried hundreds of times to sort off one single cow doesn't really seem to to work very well so if we can get a majority of them in here and then get her sorted off that'll make our life a whole lot [Music] easier the big problem is that when I went out and found them this morning they were about a mile away so it's a little bit of a walk for a cow that has a bad leg sometimes I'll call it a bad pin but um we don't know what's wrong with her and that's the reason we want to bring her in we want to take a look at her leg it could be something as simple as she has something in her hoof that we could help her out with it could be as bad as hoof rot which is something that we don't want to deal with but we're never going to know out in the past year and this is part of animal husbandry you want to make sure that your animals are as healthy as possible and as comfortable as possible especially when they're out walking around and having a bad leg having to move around for food and stuff like that is not going to do her any good she is pregnant therefore we do want to keep her until she has her calf at least even if she does have a bad leg so we've got a few uh contingency plans in place for that but first I really do think we just need to get a look at her so we have about 70 cows out here in this pasture right now uh it looks like they're kind of split up between three groups I want them work from the farthest back or at least from the cow that we're looking for and I don't see her yet but it looks like that might be her right there I see a cow with a little bit of a limp she's right there behind Cracker Jack we're going to swing over and take a look here all right so here she is this is the cow that we're looking for you can see that back left leg she's putting uh very very little weight on and uh she's definitely not happy with us about it that's for sure uh we are going to try to get all these guys in and then get her sorted off up into the choot where we can take a look at her some days that can be easier said than done it's uh probably in the 40s right now I don't know what the exact temperature is but these guys definitely don't want to come in you can see they're laying out here in the pasture they're pretty content but we have to get them up into the coral so we can take care of her so we're going to inconvenience 69 cows in order to take care of one come on guys time to get up come on let's go come on let's go home so we are technically just worried about her so if we leave some cows behind it's not that bad of a deal but if we leave too many behind she's going to turn around and see those cows back there and she's going to want to go back to them trust me it happens every single time so if we can get a majority of them going um it does make a life a little bit easier when it comes time to sort her off we don't have a whole bunch of cows to deal with but getting a majority of them is pretty Paramount to trying to do this so I think they know where they're going it's just a matter of they don't want to go there come on guys come on that's her up there she's trying to get away from us come on girl be careful be careful don't hurt yourself anymore thank you if we can get her in this group we might be okay a majority of our other cows are actually over on the other side of that road so chances are she won't be able to see them if we can keep her up with this group it'll make life easier when it comes time to sort if we have to sort her off of you know 20 cows instead of 70 cows it'll make life a little bit easier so as long as she's going the right direction I'm pretty happy and I can still see her she's right up there moving along she's not moving horribly bad for having a bad leg which is a good sign we noticed about 3 or 4 days ago that she was starting to limp um we kind of kept an eye on her since then but it's not really getting any better um it's not getting any worse either but it's definitely worth looking at so so a little proactive measure is definitely not a bad thing when it comes to your cattle especially when you're thinking about you know calves that could be potentially worth $3,000 once they're into the feed lot so we want to make sure that uh both her and her calf are as healthy as we can get them the nice part about this too is that we have Cracker Jack in this group he's uh our lead steer so he will be able to help make these cows feel better hopefully um with wherever they're going this is a really good example of how you come out with one plan that plan changes you have to be able to adapt um obviously I don't need to bring all the cows makes my life easier but at the same time um we do cause more problems by having less cows if they happen to decide to turn around and go back to those other cows so uh being able to adapt as we go change our plans it's a big part of ranching it's a big part of life but uh for this circumstance I think it's actually working pretty well a few more looks like Cavs coming back to join us of course I think they're of the opinion that uh they think something cool is going to happen they just they just want to be a part of the In Crowd as you can see a lot of cows back behind us I'm actually trying to ditch those guys as we go these guys you're definitely moving in the right direction so I don't need everybody else I don't need the help I'm sure we're going to have plenty of it once we get up here closer we get to the gate we can actually start sorting off some more of these cows Cracker Jack can stay back we're going to move forward we're going to just kind of pass these cows by and kind of give them the signal that they don't need to be here you can see our lame ones right there she's the one we want right in front of us now where she's going to go I'd like to get her in this gate or the gate down this way but we'll see what she does she's got a partner in there makes her feel a little bit better all right okay so this is where our decoy cows are going to come in handy we've got them back there on the food as we move these guys towards the lot which is that 3 Acre little area that I was telling you guys about earlier the hope is that they will see those cows and they'll move towards them this is where we have the potential to lose some cows they've got to make a a weird jog around this gate and we've got to get them to drop back in which we have done so now rather than sorting off 70 cows or 69 cows we only have 15 or so makes life a lot easier everybody else however is going to miss breakfast for right now and my four-wheeler is dead well this makes life a little interesting huh that's new got no power maybe it's a battery problem maybe we just have a loose connection maybe yep loose connection and something else to put on the list wow could have been worse could have been worse that's for sure okay we're going to head up here and hopefully uh we've got her pretty close to the gate I don't know we're going to find out I've got the gate open I actually put some feed inside the pen uh to kind of get some of these guys to come in and water is down here also so that could be a deciding factor but it's not because she's right there with everybody else hey girly okay we're going to see if we can move her towards the the Corral where we want her so there's some other cows down there which is nice that'll help us out a little bit come on girl go see your friends down there yeah see those guys go see what they're up to nope not that way other way there you go look at that we've got her in now we're only dealing with uh six cows this will make life a little easier looks like three of them we can get out of here right away come on get get out and then we've got her and two others down here to deal with you stay mama you stay no you're going to stay here you don't have to leave hey no your friend there can go though oh 38 get out of here come on girls 38 you can leave no you stay in 130 I know you're mad at me you stay in no no no no oh okay well that didn't work I didn't feel like getting run over today so let's go back and try again come on turn around mama go back that way come on come on you stinkers and she's going to go hide in the bar in the shed here try to get her to turn back around that corner okay get back in there get back in there hey don't go back there you dumb cow and I just killed the four-wheeler dang it and there she [Music] goes we're going to get her come on H H somebody go with her that would be helpful come on guys come on let's go come on go see the chickens There You Go Mama come on come on Mom so when we get her going the way we want to we actually let off pressure so that she will walk quietly into the Corral where we need her look at that told you we get her okay close another gate probably shouldn't turn off the [Music] fourwheeler [Music] and she's now in here by herself what we need to do is get her up into the a equip uh we're going to end up putting her into the Chute where we can take a look at her foot you can tell she's not happy it probably hurts we do have some medication for her that will help with that but we need to get her into a confined space to do that so first off going to get this gate open and I think the best place to move her into is right here and into this Corral it's our first stop in the a equip and hopefully uh she'll be okay with that she moves really quick for only having three legs okay this is the trick getting them in that little tiny Alle come on girl come on Mama come on don't be mad at me come on mama you know where I want you to go oh gosh are you okay see that's what I was afraid of that's uh unfortunate cuz that's probably how she hurt herself in the first place maybe come on go down there that alley get in there nope there we go good girl good girl all right we've got her here in the Corral now that she's in here I'm going to go ahead and get the gate closed obviously and then I'm going to give her a few minutes just to kind of chill out getting here for her was probably painful you can tell she's not in the best mood um and it's uh I'm sorry you want to smell my hand no you don't want to smell my hand uh she's not in the best mood obviously so it's probably better to just kind of let her chill for a little bit she's going to be annoyed uh she's going to be even more annoyed once we bring her into the shoot so give her five or 10 minutes probably 10 minutes at least to uh to kind of settle down catch her wind and what I'm also going to do is open up a gate so she can get to water come on girl come [Music] on and maybe she's going to grab a drink maybe not again not her favorite person right now but we are going to try to make her feel [Music] better all right she's had about 10 or 15 minutes to settle down over here I think most of the rodeo is probably over with not exactly sure but what I can do is go ahead and open up a couple Gates and we're going to see if we can use some of her her own angst against her and move her up towards the shoe so let's see what she does here I don't want to push her too hard you can see that she's mad enough now that she's actually ignoring that foot pretty much come on girl come on let's go come on come on come on move your butt come on [Applause] okie dokie we may have to play a little rodeo clown here now I could go jump back on the four-wheeler which would probably be the safest thing to do but I would rather just have her get up into some of these corals and out of our way come on okay now she's coming out come on cow come on quit fronting I'm trying to help you I swear to God I am come on Mom come over here get don't turn back on me Mom all right well we are on the wrong side so we're going to switch to the outside of the Corral on the other side hopefully get her to come up through that gate and then be able to get it closed behind her so she can move into the tub sounds like a great plan right come on Mom come on get up there all right now we got to even even smaller area we're just whittling down here yeah not a happy camper come on Mom move your butt up you got to keep moving come on come on Mom keep going a little further just have a little further to [Music] go okay now we got her even in a smaller area and then she's going to move up into the alley even a smaller area she does not like us whatsoever and close this gate behind her now we've got her locked here in the the Preen I guess is what you could call it everything is secure ready to go for her to come in to the shoot come on in girl okay now we've got her in the shoot I'm going to close this because I don't trust her there you go and she's now in the shoot so one of the big things that I want to know right off about is how much she weighs and this is going to dictate any type of medication that we're going to give to her but also um it's good to just keep track of these kind of Records so my scale is here she weighs 1,410 lb that would have hurt running me over luckily she didn't I'm going to jump onto my app here uh where I keep track of everything it's called cattle Max and I can pull her up we can you can see if she's gained or lost weight which is actually a pretty good indication of how um she's doing physically so I'm going to pull up her information there she is we're going to go into performance she has actually lost some weight not a lot um what do we say 1410 last time she was weighed she weighed 14.95 so she has lost a little bit of weight not really uncommon for this type but she has lost since we last weighed her and this is the big indic since we last weighed her she has she has lost 1.6 lb per day so that's not good um her losing weight is not a good sign so now that we know what she weighs we can go get her some medication but we still have to take a look at that foot that's coming up and that's going to be a little spooky um but we can run to the shop we'll grab some medication for her this is my medicine cabinet um every Rancher probably keeps one uh somewhere along the line and we are going to be giving her um couple different medications now I'm going to talk about some other ones that we could give her for this but the uh I can find it maybe I don't have any anyway so I think I would oh there it is okay so with a with an injury like this um there is a slight chance that it could be Hof rot if it's Hof rot we want to give her antibiotics um if she has any type of infection or anything like that we want to make sure that we give her antibiotics we'll probably take her temperature today too just to make sure uh that she's not running a temperature because if she is then it's good good sign that she has some sort of infection um I have banamine here now banamine is actually used for inflammation this will actually um help her out with some of the pain relief um in the olden days or you know a few years ago uh we would have given her la200 which is liquamycin which is antibiotic um the problem with this is that it's a massive dose for a cow her size you would need about 140 CC's that's a lot and that's a lot of needles um with exceed uh which is another antibiotic and it's a 5-day course antibiotic um we only have to give her 14 CC's so a big difference there this stuff is more expensive um it's going to cost you about $200 for this little tiny bottle but uh the fact that you don't have to keep on giving them Doses and you don't have to give that large of a dose makes a really big difference so we're going to load up some syringes for her and uh then head back out take a look at her hoof do all the things we need to do all right for banamine we'll start out with banamine um dosage here is going to be 14 CC's or milliliters and again this should make her feel a whole lot better reduce some of that swelling and everything else we have to deal with for the exceed uh the calculations are a little bit tougher but it works out at 1.5 m per 45 kg of cow so for us that means do a little math she's 639 kg 639 we just call it 640 divided by 45 time 1.5 comes right in close to 20 milliliters or cc's of exceed so there's our medication that we're going to need for her today banamine and exceed the other thing we'll do is take her temperature um pretty hard to keep a cow to keep a thermometer underneath their tongue so we'll do it Rey which is super fun but I do want to check make sure she doesn't have an elevated temperature um that would be an indication of some sort of infection or something like that that's going on in there um the banamine will actually deal with that but uh it's just kind of nice to know so the other thing that we do with her is everything that we do to her we're actually logging in the cattlemax program as well so that we know exactly what we gave her for dosages of what and when are you feeling any better no she's not feeling a lick better in order to protect ourselves we're going to make sure everything is set up here the way we need it and now we're going to try to get her in the head head shoot this will lock her head down hopefully make her a little bit easier to deal with come on put your head in come on [Music] Mama step back just a little bit wow she's a big cow we're also going to put a little squeeze on her and I don't know how much I'm going to be able to do that but this bar allows me to squeeze the shoot down just a little a little bit put a little bit of pressure against her which then makes them feel better too she's calm somewhat um which is good so I think we'll start at one end and we'll work our way towards the other and the first end we're going to mess around with is with the thermometer here and we are going to try to get her temperature again she's not going to be happy about this neither am I but that's okay [Music] hold still [Music] Mom okay so at normal cow's temperature runs about 101° get her tail out of the way here hey hey hey hey she is running about 105 104.6 right there so that tells me that there is a chance that she could have some sort of infection also Al she's a little worked up right now but um it's definitely not a good indication of what we've got going on here um we're going to give her her medications but I also want to look at that foot now this is where things get a little bit tricky uh we can duck into the back of the Shute here we're going to sneak out behind her now really quick I'd like to take a look at this side just to just a look at this hoof as well and look at the the hoof that we're looking at from the other side so again we're not seeing any redness we're not seeing any swelling um it looks to be okay if we can see the hoves from the front we not seeing anything down and inside there usually you'd be able to see some redness in there even on the other hoof everything looks okay she's not happy but I'm going to say that based on what we're seeing here here it's not a hoof problem um I would say that she probably fell at some point and may have actually landed on that side hurt that hurt that hip is kind of what I'm thinking so um what we're going to do is we're going to get her her medications and then we're going to get her out of here uh these are actually pretty big doses when you're looking at stuff that's like 20 you know 20 ml that's a lot to put in one injection site on the cow so I like to do multiples um I might split this over three for the exceed banamine I'll probably split over at least two injection sites all of these are subcutaneous both of these guys are so means they're just underneath the skin which is fine they could go intermuscular um they're going to do about the same good either way as far as I've heard so all we have to do is get these injections into her without you know breaking our own arm the AO equip has a handy little injection sight door here and I'm going to start out with the banamine and we're just going to do this in a couple different injection spots split it up over two makes it really simple wait for her to settle down a little bit and there's the banamine the banamine should help her feel better again that's an anti-inflammatory so if she does have any swelling ligaments joints anything like that it'll definitely help out uh this is our antibiotic if she has any infection any where even in our hooves that we couldn't have seen um this will actually take care of that as well and again this is a five or a 7 Day if I remember right actually it can goes it can go as long as 13 um depending on the size of the animal so let's uh get this in here and this is a thicker type of medication so that's why I like to split it up over a few different injection points all within this triangle that we want to inject in which is the neck triangle right here which goes kind of like that and we'll do one more subcutaneous underneath the skin and injected once again we're not making any friends on the ranch here but that's okay um she is going to go out here with those other cows they're going to have to deal with her crankiness I'm not going to um we're going to take the squeeze off of her and then I'll open up the headgate so this is something that a lot of folks uh there's different rules of thought to this whether you take the squeeze off first or you open the headgate first I've heard it done either way honestly I probably switch it up quite a bit mostly just trying to figure out what works better the theory is that if you leave the squeeze on them you open up the headgate they're going to move forward easier um I don't think we're going to have any problem with her getting out of this head shoot ready girl and There She Goes number 130 seems to have something going on not exactly sure what and that lame foot on the left obviously we looked at both feet sometimes it's hard to tell which foot a cow is lame on um the way that they're walking but we did look at everything we looked at all her all both feet we looked at her her knees her ankles all that kind of good stuff um I think that this will actually help her out but here's the thing we are going to keep her in for quite a while actually um so that we can see exactly how she progresses and how she does um sometimes it's easier to see uh feet remember this from the other side of the shoot so when you're working on one side of the shoot if you're working on feet or at least looking at at their Hooves um sometimes it's easier to look from the other side of the shoot as well and that's what we kind of took care of here here uh but you do want to check as long as you've got them in you might as well check it out as much as you can so these guys they're back together but really it's all about keeping these cows happy I guarantee you she's going to feel better with that shot of banamine it's going to loosen up some muscles or ligaments or anything else she might have damaged the antibiotics will help with any infection that might be caused um if it is a H foot hoof problem that we weren't able to see from either side of the Chute um hopefully that'll take care of it otherwise there's not a whole lot else that we can really do for her at this point um we do have her closed in now this will make her life a little bit easier she doesn't have to walk up and down 400 acres to get food she's got food she's got water all within uh just about 50 ft so that'll make her life a lot easier to help her heal up and then eventually hopefully she can go back out to the herd where she can have her calf but for right now she's definitely not too happy about being here in the crow she'll get used to it trust me all right we will check back in with her a little bit later we've got more videos on the way I hope you guys have a great Christmas plan and uh I'll probably take Monday off from videos we'll be back on Thursday with a brand new video I've got the gator back and over the last couple weeks you guys have been suggesting what I need to have in the gator to make my life easier well we're going to stalk her back up and with a lot of your guys' suggestions so be sure to subscribe follow along as we explore the ranch life and escape the ordinary and try not to get run over by cows right here on our Wyoming [Music] life

Channel: Our Wyoming Life

Views: 124,383

Keywords: Ranch, cow, cows, horses, cowboy, gardening, farmers market, Wyoming, our Wyoming life, animals, animal videos, peacock, farming, planting, cattle, ranching

Id: PgMX9o9QFCo

Length: 39min 24sec (2364 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 23 2023