Amazingly Chop 26 made it through the night and greeted Vet Mike the following morning by standing up. A blood sample was taken (it came back with half the amount of red blood cells that even the most minimal count should be) to determine presence of anemia, most likely caused by worms and other parasites sucking the little guy’s blood. Fecal samples collected (tests came back from all three indicating heavy parasite loads). And then we rigged up a drip to pump some hydrating and rather sugary solution into him.
Vet Mike gave us no hope, but did stay an extra hour to de-horn the bulls and talk dairy cows in general. We have your basic Jersey calves. All skin and bones, beautiful brown color. “Oh, and this one is a girl,” he mentioned causally. Well! Un-dropped testes indeed. Apparently the twins were of no use to the Amish dairyman because of hormone stuff that happens in the womb. A girl born twin to a boy would have been exposed to testosterone, making her milk, as she grew into milking age, no good.
“And you can turn them out onto pasture. They won’t eat it very hard. Make sure to have good hay for them here, nearby their water. And you can do some of the calf starter feed if you want. Their stomachs will develop shortly into being able to handle the 
green grass, but for now, they need to eat more dry stuff to develop the ruminant qualities.” His happened to be the third opinion we’d received on this business of eating. As it compared amicably with the second opinion, we went for it.
A day later – Chop 26 lived to see another day. After applying sub-cutaneous antibiotics for the hoof rot, not to mention the shots one dog gets for allergies, I do believe I’ve administered more shots in my first half year of animal husbandry than my third-year medical school sister . . . . Soon enough she’ll be caring for me, hopefully with a heck of a lot more practice. I get the impression she is reading relevant books before getting out her tools.
I’m not happy about the shot-giving. For the lambs and their parasite/worm load, it’s been a bomber year for problems, with vet clinics siting up to a thirty percent increase in the little blood-sucking populations. Looks like the traditional de-worming medicines are loosing their oomph, and once again we’ve increased the resistance of a pest to our slew of drugs. It’s time for me to research several things: other de-worming stuff, sheep varieties with better resistance to parasites, and mroe specifics on rotational grazing to help this problem. Should I need to move my ‘herd’ of four several times a day, I may reconsider altogether . . .
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