Just When I Needed You!

Rachel at Welcome To Wilmoth Farms was hit very hard in Kentucky by the ice storm that passed through on Tuesday, January 27th.

If you follow my blog you know that during that storm our little Angus was born. My first thought while he was thawing out in our living room was, I knew Rachel will have some advice for me since it has been many, many years since we raised any calves on bottles.

I had many questions, like how long he should have colostrum, since his Mother never let him nurse? If the goat colostrum that I had on hand would work since the roads were so bad that we couldn't get out to get anything else? How much should he be drinking and how often?

Then the really, really big question, how do you stop these scours????

But alas, Rachel is still without power and Angus may be half grown before she is back among the enlightened. She did read my post about Angus and left a comment but she is only checking in when she can. Since for some reason I am not able to post comments on her blog, I will just have to communicate with her here.

Hello, Rachel, hope you are doing well and I hope that your place is thawed out by now and clean-up is nearly done. I really hope that you get your electricity back soon. But I must say that these on again, off again scours are driving me mad!

Angus is healthy and strong, has bonded with my DH and follows him everywhere he goes. He always runs in a gallop with a few twists and bucks. When he is hungry, he comes to the door and rattles the doorknob, this gave me quite a fright the first time that he did it and I was here all alone.

Since he is staying in the barn right outside my living room door, I am seeing most of his bowel movements and smelling them. Some are firm but some like the one that I slid in the other night and almost fell are very runny.

I would appreciate your home remedy for scours very much. He is currently getting 6 quarts of medicated replacer per day with some yogurt and an egg in each bottle. He is also getting mushed up Calf Manna and we are putting a couple of tablespoons of Pepto-Bismol in each bottle if he appears to need it.

Rested

I slept through the night for the first time in ages. I feel much better this morning. Although my back didn't like it much. I found that my back doesn't hurt as badly when I get up several times during the night. Just like my back doesn't like to sit in a chair for more than 10 minutes or stand on my feet for more than 5 minutes. I guess maybe I should set my alarm and continue to get up during the night.

I want to thank all of my friends who called, left comments here on my blog and sent me e-mails of encouragement through the last two weeks.

I have had people ask, why we just didn't put her down in the first place. Well, if we could have seen the future and had known that her kidneys were defective, we would have. But we have pulled high risk foals back from the brink before and so we couldn't let her go without exhausting every avenue of treatment. As long as there is hope, I find it hard to give up on them.

We had a foal years ago that was born to a mother with no milk, she was a fescue baby. This was back before the fescue problem had even been identified. We had just bought the mare and didn't know she was bred. The baby got no colostrum, it was also back before any of our local stores carried mare milk replacer, I don't even know if there was such a thing at that time anyway. I am really telling my age here. But anyway, we put her on Carnation calf milk replacer.

We didn't have the internet then and we didn't know anything about raising a foal on a bottle but we did know how to raise calves that way, so that is how we raised Bambi. She was just a little, half pony, half horse, sorrel filly.

She got septic, navel ill and her all of her joints swelled up. All of this happened during the coldest part of winter. I remember crawling to the barn on the ice to give her bottles. She got to the point that she couldn't stand or get to her feet.

She got scours, got dehydrated and even got pneumonia at one point. We just pumped her full of antibiotics and somehow pulled her through it all. Looking back on it now, I cannot believe that she survived but she did and went on to become a riding horse and the people that bought her from us even raised foals with her. She lived to be an old horse but did get arthritis when she got older.