Bob
Since four-month-old Daisy, daughter of deceased Daffodil, was now motherless and all alone (see Post, “The Day Daffodil Departed”), Maggie and Ashley, our 20-something tenants/farming duo, reclaimed possession of Cream Cheese who had been on loan as a company cow for my Pippa. Cream Cheese was only moving down the road, but I was uneasy about her exodus having just poured over numerous web articles about farm animals preferring the company of others and not being keen to live alone. Would Pip try to escape and run down the road seeking comfort from her former roommate? Would she refuse to be milked and rear up in protest, knock me to ground and then stomp on me? Fortunately, Pip, my super sweet Jersey girl, was unfazed by her abrupt state of solitude. The bitter stretch of extreme cold had resumed, and Pip was more than content to be cozied up in her deeply bedded stall at night and equally pleased to be greeted by me in the morning for milking chores and the requisite scoop of grain. Nonetheless, her days to herself lasted only a few weeks. On yet another bitter cold late January evening, Meg, our third farmer in residence and her boyfriend AJ delivered a new roommate for Pip, a Brown Swiss bull calf named Bob.
A bit about AJ - He was big and strong and had grown up under his grandfather’s expert farming tutelage where he picked up numerous agriculturally related skills. Since Meg was my critical farming support person, I felt assurance that her partner AJ could handle a potentially heavy lifting crisis whether I was home or off on a periodic visit to Amsterdam, Netherlands where Matt was working at the time. Secretly, I was hoping AJ would get the itch to endeavor into his own farming entity that might be a nice complement to the very modest farm thing I had going on. As it turned out, a few months before AJ moved into our farmhouse rental with Meg, he had acquired two cast-off bull calves from a local dairy farm. Dairy cows in a commercial operation are typically bred to have one calf a year to maintain a high yielding milk production. Unfortunately, only a select few female calves are retained by the farmer for replacement stock and the rest (always the males) are separated from their mother at a few days old and sent off to any number of places where they spend a short life being raised for the veal market. Where there are dairy farms, there is no shortage of bull calves being advertised on Craigslist or some other classifieds services, and their price tags are pretty cheap (when I was volunteering at Kiss the Cow Farm, one Jersey bull calf sold from their barn for a whopping $10!).
AJ’s acquisition, Bill and Bob, ultimately ended up being plunked in AJ’s grandfather’s pasture where they spent the fall of 2017 being knocked around by a herd of Hereford beef cows. From the story I was given, I surmised that Bill was a weakling, failing to thrive likely from being weaned off milk several weeks too early. Consequently, AJ decided that he was better off “eliminated” from the bunch, leaving Bob all alone, relegated to a stall under the barn, protected from the bashings from the older cows.
As might be expected, Pip was thrilled to take this little loner under her wing as his surrogate mum. I now know where the term “cow lick” comes from. Like a mother cat to her kittens, Pippa licked him clean leaving swaths of combed fur from every swipe of her heavily budded tongue. For the remainder of the winter, Bob followed Pip to the hay feeder during the day and back to the stall where they cozied up next to each other at night.
As the winter weather was finally turning a corner with teasing springlike conditions, it became apparent that little Bob was transitioning to big boy Bob. As noted earlier, I’m certain that AJ’s acquisition of Bob was a low budget transaction, and I surmised that he was keen to keep his investment in this animal as minimal as possible. Hence the explanation for why Bob still had his balls. Nonetheless, my visits to Pip were becoming a hazard as I had to make sure Bob was always in my sites. He was adopting bullish tendencies, and I did not want to be on the receiving end of any of them. I didn’t care what it cost; the balls had to go!
My new friend, Dr. Barry, was happy to make a house call, and Meg and I were his assistants. The two of us, one at the head and the other at his tail, jammed Bob up against the wall of the stall while Dr. Barry’s applied his “Double Crush Emasculator” tool, successfully decimating the spermatic cord and artery bringing the end of bad boy Bob. After a period of swelling, the little ball sack shriveled up, and all was happy in the barn again.
Pip and Bob blissfully enjoyed their concierge service – bedding refreshed twice a day, hay fluffed in the feeder, stray bits of grass scooped from the water trough – through the remainder of the winter and spring. Apart from my periodic visits with Matt in Amsterdam, I was their primary caregiver. I was happy to have Bob as a barn mate and never felt that AJ was shirking responsibility by allowing me to manage his care. Both he and Meg were more than willing to step in to assist whenever it was necessary. I was not yet a full year into my farming endeavor, but I already felt a tremendous sense of pride in my growing operation. In the past, I would have been much too intimidated to take on this kind of responsibility. I always knew I couldn’t do it alone. Now I had started something that was based on a foundation of cooperation and camaraderie. I was finally digging into this aspiration that was always just a “someday” thing, and I had support and encouragement to empower me to keep going. I couldn’t wait for summer.
