Feeding Rosbif

We had a fun afternoon trying to get the calf to feed. We have called him Rosbif (or Biff for short).

Mums teats are huge and distended and he didn't seem to be able to tell what they were for. He gave all the other cows a go to suckle from. Then Buttercup moved everytime he got vaguely in the right area. We were getting worried when he was still looking skinny and unfed after 12 hours and Buttercups teats still had the bungs in the end.

We started off trying to move him and Buttercup closer to the house, but didn't have much luck with that, he weighs a tonne (well, maybe 35kg) and she doesn't lead very well. It was 30 degres in the shade and totally hotching with flys...

I went and bought a calf feeding bucket with a nipple from Point Vert as we knew we needed to get some colostrum down him even if he wouldn't feed from Buttercup. They need colostrum in th 1st 24 hours or so to get their immune system going and generally don't survive if they don't get it.

I milked Buttercup in to the bucket and we managed to get a little bit in to him. I had read that you should tickle their bottom to get them to suckle so Doug gave that a go, at which point he did a really sticky blackish poo. Nice. He did suckle though.

We then went back to milk more (we had to tie Buttercup up to grt her to stay still to be milked). The little bit Biff had had seemed to super charge him and he had th energy to totter over to where we were with Buttercup. She finally seemed to notice he existed and mooed at him. As he was so keen on suckling we decided to try him on Buttercup. Doug held him while I wedged one of Buttercups really huge teats in his mouth and he finally got the hang of it. He didn't seem able to latch on on his own, but we put him on all 4 teats and we could see his belly growing as he ate.

Meeting his herd mates. They all seemed nice and gentle with him, and very tolerant at being suckled.

We then left them too it. We will go back tomorrow morning to see if he has worked out the latching on yet. He seemed pretty motivated having got a taste of the delicious milk. 

We were absolutely knackered having spent ages chasing Buttercup around. It was all very stressful as we didn't know whether we were doing the right thing or just making it worse. So relieved when he managed to eat. Animals! Grr!