My cowboy Christmas
I’ve read all the articles telling the unenlightened, like me, about all the money we’re leaving on the table by not weaning our calves for at least 45 days. I don’t blame the feeders and stocker operators who don’t want to put up with sickly bawling calves either but some of us run on leased land and don’t have the facilities to wean our calves. For two years I attempted to put a long wean on our calves and I still have bad dreams about it.
We gathered the herd, sorted off the calves and thus began the nightmare. At the time we were living in a trailer house on the ranch within a stone’s throw from our weaning pens so we got to listen to the cacophony of calves all night. Even the bottle calves that never tasted their mother’s milk were bawling for their mommas long since gone. I tried everything from ear plugs to Tylenol PM but I didn’t sleep a wink. So I woke up grouchy… who could sleep through an earthquake. My wife’s naturally cheery outlook started getting on my frayed nerves and by the end of breakfast I was already madder than a rained on rooster, only to look outside to see there’d been a jailbreak and half the calves were already back with their moms.
The problem was to reinforce a falling-down set of corrals where I intended to wean our calves. I bought a load of cheap panels that I swear were welded together with the school glue you used in kindergarten. Those calves and their mad mothers made quick work of those panels so we had to gather the entire herd again to sort off the jailbirds. That meant the noise on the second night was even worse. Even grouchy couldn’t sleep so she took that opportunity to announce she was going to visit her sister. This meant I had to feed and doctor the sick calves all by my lonesome.
One thing all the articles fail to mention when weaning your calves are all the added costs involved. I’d already spent a small fortune on the panels and now I had to feed the calves 75 pound sacks of a starter ration I bought from a feed mill an hour from home. Then there was the chiropractor bill I paid to realign my back after lifting a truckload of 75 pound sacks all by myself because my wife was still at her sister’s place.
For some reason my calves have always been dumber than a fence post. They didn’t even know what a water trough was because they’d been drinking out of a creek their entire lives so I had to dig an artificial river through the weaning pens and run water through it from a water truck I had to rent. Then one day I had a brainstorm; I put on my swim trunks and frolicked in a water trough splashing water on the noses of the stupid calves until they figured out there was water in them there troughs. Then there’s the cost of all the vaccines my vet said my calves would need to satisfy the buyers and reap the big rewards. Add it all up over the 45 days that separates the premiums from the discounts and I think I’d have been better off if half the calves had died the day we kidnapped them from their mothers.
The next year we tried something called fence-line-weaning that must have been invented by someone with w-a-a-ay better fences than mine because after every jailbreak of fence crawlers I had to spend three days fixing fence all by my lonesome because my wife was on her now-annual visit to see her sister.
During the National Finals Rodeo every year in addition to all the rodeo action there are big trade shows they call Cowboy Christmas which I absolutely love. I mention it here only to say that my Cowboy Christmas occurred instead on the 45th day of weaning when I said good riddance to those little hell-raisers with not a tear in my eye.
And that’s why we went back to weaning our calves the same day we sent them to the auction market. It was either that or my wonderful wife was going to go stay with her sister on a more permanent basis.
