Bertha Belle is making me crazy. I don't know if it is just my "big cow" prejudice or if she really does have an irritating personality. I can't find the darn camera (again!) so I can't show you how much better both girls are looking.
Bambi is still my favorite and milking very well. In fact, milk production for both of them is on the rise. I wish that I knew when they had freshened.......
Anyway, Bertha Belle is not healing in the foot department. Bambi is getting around with just a slight limp. Bertha Belle is still having serious problems with her left hind foot. In fact, I am tinking that she has regressed.
She is making me crazy because she is absolutely the nastiest cow on the planet. I have never seen anything like this. They are roaming on several grassy acres but this cow will come back and deliberately lay down in her own poop! She is filthy and stinks to high heaven. Her udder is ALWAYS covered in manure. At every milking, I have to haul buckets of soapy, warm water and rags out in to the barn for a big wash up job. This is not a good thing to do..... especially at every milking as it leads to a chapped, sore udder. Modern dairies have a cow version of disposable sanitary wipes that we use for a quick pre-milking clean up. Not with Bertha Belle! Those handy, dandy wipes are no match for this manure coated udder.
It is not a case of accidently getting in a big mess. This cow has some kind of mental issue and actually prefers to be smeared in her feces....... All over---not just her udder. I am going to give her a while to get over it but there is only so much I can tolerate.
Tonight, Seth and I decided to get aggressive with treating her sore foot. We took turns wrestling it up and hanging on during the mad kicking to get it all cleaned out. For a woman with a phobia about getting kicked by a cow, I was really impressed with myself. After we were reasonably sure we had gotten the 5 lbs of manure off her foot and out from between her toes, we then took turns squirting antiseptic and other meds in every crack and crevice we could see in a hoof on the fly...... I bet she is not real anxious to come in to be milked in the morning!
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