It’s the Pitts: My Cowboy Christmas
I’ve read all of the articles telling the unenlightened like me about all of 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 stockers who don’t want to put up with sickly, bawling calves, 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 “Grouchyˮ – who could sleep through an earthquake. My wifeʼs 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 of the calves were already back with their moms.
The problem was, to reinforce the falling-down set of corrals where I intended to wean our calves, I had bought a load of cheap panels I swear were welded together with the school glue we used in kindergarten.
Those calves and their mad mothers made quick work of the panels, so we had to gather the entire herd again to sort off the jailbirds. This meant the noise on the second night was even worse.
Even “Grouchyˮ couldn’t sleep, so she took the opportunity to announce she was going to visit her sister, which meant I had to feed and doctor the sick calves all by my lonesome.
One thing all of the articles fail to mention when weaning calves are all of the added costs involved.
I’d already spent a small fortune on panels, and now I had to feed 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 fencepost.
They didn’t even know what a water trough was because they’d been drinking out of a creek their entire lives. I had to dig an artificial river through the weaning pens and run water through from a water truck I had to rent.
Then one day I had a brainstorm. I put on my swim trunks and frolicked in the water trough, splashing water on the noses of my stupid calves until they figured out there was water in the troughs.
Then there’s the cost of all of the vaccines the vet said my calves would need to satisfy buyers and reap 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 of the calves had died the day we kidnapped them from their mothers.
The next year we tried something called fence-line-weaning which must have been invented by someone with way 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 Wrangler National Finals Rodeo every year there are big trade shows they call Cowboy Christmas, which I absolutely love. I mention it here only to say 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 this is 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.
