Down cows

As a veterinarian on my own farm, some things really bother me. One of them is cows who go down and can’t get up. You might consider this column similar to a small get-together with a couple other dairy people over a beer or a brandy. It’s a way of commiserating about down cows. Don’t expect to learn anything new, but you’re welcome to share my frustrations.

We had a down cow yesterday — a Jersey-cross cow who has had eight lactations and has been a real milk wagon for us with 230,000 pounds of milk in her lifetime. She had a calf at about eight o’clock in the morning and fortunately was placed in a bedded pack pen. I got a phone call just after Jordan Love threw a touchdown pass in the Packers game that she was down. So, I rushed to the farm and found her lying flat, her belly getting bigger from bloating and close to death. We have a skeleton crew on Sunday afternoons, and football takes a couple of sets of eyes away from the farm. After an IV administration of CMPK, the cow started to belch and quiver. I told John we are lucky the heart muscle is the last muscle to quit working when there’s a shortage of calcium in the bloodstream of a cow. She eventually positioned herself on her sternum and was standing up before the sun went down.

These kinds of down cows I can live with and understand. It’s that call when I’m at a wedding or a car show to say there’s a cow down in group three that irritates me. Cows in milking groups are not supposed to go down, but our employees are all trained on how to move a cow into a large skid loader bucket and put them in a comfortable place. We just want them to be sure that moving a down cow doesn’t cause more harm. A recent call came when I happened to be nearby and all we had to do was flip the cow out of the stall onto the walk and she got up and was normal. She had been cast in her stall; cast is another word for not being able to get up. The sand level in her stall was so low the cow was having a hard time rocking herself in order to get up. Blame this one on the cow that paws the sand out of stalls.

Then, in the same pen a few days later, another cow was down. It was apparent that she had injured a rear leg. We carried her outside, put her on a nice sandy area and eventually figured out that she had torn the ligaments in her knee. Her prognosis for standing again was zero.

So why do we have cows who get injured like the previous example? We all know there are tons of reasons, everything from the concrete being too slippery to cows who are in heat. Perhaps someone chased a group of cows too quickly, and they slipped going around the corner, or it could even odd things like a tire blowing out on a spreader near the barn, and all the cows got frightened and ran to the other end, causing some cows to get knocked down. There are other reasons that are more on the medical side too, such as mastitis and severe diarrhea and cows that are just getting old.

A 1,500-pound cow with little hope of healing torn muscles or ligaments and thusly has a slim chance of successful recovery is the most frustrating. We all take pride in our animals, and when you have these good-looking, healthy, high-producing cows, and a few hours later, they are down, it sucks. It’s not only the loss of a 4,000-dollar cow and her profit for the farm, but it’s the frustration of not being able to prevent the injuries.

About 25 years ago, I was on a farm visit in northeastern Wisconsin with some other farmers. This farm was milking 300 cows at that time and had a room built in which he could lower a cow into a pool if she had been injured. A few years ago, we bought an aqua tank. It is portable, and we have used it at times. If an injury doesn’t seem to be too severe — or we’re not exactly sure why a cow won’t get up, but she is eating — we may try to float her. However, results are best if they are floated within 24 hours of an injury, and it does require two or three people to get the cow into the tank. Plus, we need at least 800 gallons of 101-degree water. The tank does help make a diagnosis, and the cow will help determine the prognosis of further care by the way she stands as she’s floating. We have about a 20% success rate with the tank. It helps differentiate between back injuries and leg injuries. The cows like it so much, I wish there was a way to rehabilitate them in a big pool. Maybe I’ll win Megabucks and think about it.

We all know down cows have no quick cures. The ones who don’t have injuries most often require extensive treatment, like the cow who gets missed with an acute mastitis in the parlor and then becomes weak and goes down. She gets a ride to a more comfortable pen, and hopefully, with proper treatment, she will return to the milking pen soon. A cow with severe diarrhea that’s losing a lot of electrolytes and goes down many times will respond to IV treatment, but we need to find the reason why she had the diarrhea. Sometimes, it’s a syndrome I call “mid-lactation breakdown,” which occasionally affects a high producing cow who has been fresh 120 days or more and can’t get up for any obvious reason. Why she is down? We treat her with IV calcium; she responds, gets up and starts to eat. This is not something I knew about when I went to veterinary school.

Just a little story from when I was in practice full time: I was called to look at a group of pregnant heifers who were down and couldn’t get up. After a little history from the farmer, I realized he had fed them recently-purchased sweetcorn silage. The silage had fermented, and these heifers were drunk and dying. We pumped a lot of heifers that day and saved most of them.

A lot of credit needs to go to those people who work with our sick cows and the vulnerable cows on our dairies, whether they’re big or small. These people must have the attitude that tomorrow will be better so they can continue to care for these animals. The slogan on the t-shirts worn by our friends and kids who were walking our young heifers in our local Labor Day parade said, “Farming — Nature’s way of teaching patience.” Down cows especially require lots of patience.