Bluebell is a bit over 16 months old and still feeding from her mum. She should have been weaned at about 5 or 6 months old, but it seems that often calves left with their mums will just go on feeding. This means that poor Buttercup is having to feed two and that Bluebell is very fat (someone who knows Jersey cows said she was the fattest Jersey she had ever seen!). It was nice for us though as it meant Buttercup still had some milk. However to let Buttercup prepare for having a new calf and to slim down Bluebell as she is probably too fat to conceive at the moment we have decided we need to intervene.
We got this horrible torture device from the local garden center/farming shop (Point Vert).
It goes on the 'calf's' (the inverted commas are because Bluebell is bigger than Buttercup and old enough to breed, so it is hard to call her a calf any more) nose and it tightened with the nut just enough to hold it in, but so that it can flip up and down. The idea is that it pushes the teats out of the way so the calf cannot get them in its mouth. The spikes are to encourage the mother to push the calf off if it persists too much.
We have had it some days and have been worrying about whether it is cruel or not. However something has to be done and the alternative is to separate them which we decided would be worse for everyone. Bluebell can still graze fine with this on and it does not hurt her (only her mum if she gets spiked!). Apparently some calves can manage to suckle anyway, so we will see how it goes.
It was quite hard to get on as her nostrils are quite far apart. Proceedings were made more exciting by it turning out that Bluebell was in heat and she kept trying to mount Buttercup. I feel fortunate that she didn't mount me when I had may back to her milking Buttercup! Noone wants a fat warty girl mounting them from behind!
The cool punk look.
You can kind of see it working here. Poor Bluebell is drooling like mad trying to get her drink
This makes it clear that if she is clever enough just to turn her head on it's side she will still be able to suckle! Let's hope she is not...
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