Queen Bess demands queenly accomodations

Photo:  A Royal Pose Well, the persnickety Bessie has upped her high maintenance even further.  The vet was out yesterday to vaccinate both Ruby the calf and Bessie (being from an organic farm, Bessie didn't ever get vaccinations, so we thought it best to give her the same shots that Ruby would get).  The 4 month old Ruby and her 8 year old mama both got the same treatment--shots in the back of the thigh to protect from various sicknesses that could literally take down a healthy calf of Ruby's age and leave it dead within 12 hours.  Scary! We've been waiting for Bess to go into heat, so that we can start keeping track of her cycles and get her bred (artificial insemination).  I was supposed to be watching the interplay between Bess and Lucy to see which one was in heat and which one was ever-so-femininely sniffing the air (or other actions) to indicate that one or the other was in heat.  With Lucy gone to live in Ohio, my heat-indicator for Bessie is out of the picture.  She has --maybe-- come into heat once since she gave birth back in July, and now even that seems in question. At my request, to give me a starting point for counting down the days until her next heat cycle, I asked the vet to give her a fertility check (plastic sleeve on, and shoulder deep in cow to "feel" what stage she is in).  Certainly it's not his favorite part of visiting a farm with cows..... The results?  She won't be coming into heat on her own.  At all.  She has a cyst.  Not good news.  Even a bull couldn't get this cow pregnant. Vet said that there are two kinds of cysts that cows get:  One type has them in heat every day, and one will keep them from ever coming into heat.  Bessie has the last kind. So the artificial insemination process will become even more artificial.  The vet is coming again today to start her on a series of shots.  He will administer the first one this morning.  I will administer the next shot next week Friday.  He will have a 4 hour window of "opportunity" to place the purchased bull's "stuff" inside of her on Monday (the insemination, artificially done), the 19th of November.  Without the extra queenly attention which will hopefully result in a royal offspring next September, she would not come into heat, could not be bred, and (in a normal dairy situation) she would be packed off to the sale barn because she would no longer be valuable to the dairyman. So in a way, Queen Bessie has been spared a very un-queenly fate because she landed on our farm, where I had no choice but to become fond of her and her bossy ways and high sense of cow-dom.  Here, she has a chance for an excellent "bovine practitioner" to work his magic.  (It seems that the challenge of the situation serves to thrill the vet about practicing all aspects of his veterinary expertise, which is a good thing.  He is "syncing" two beef cows' fertility cycles at another place at the same time, so it fits in with what he's doing on other farms, which might save us a little bit of money, too. He goes there first, comes here second, keeps track of breeding all 3 cows on the same date, it works, I hope......). We'll pray that this procedure works, and that she conceives a little prince or princess on the first try.  Even with the money from the sale of Lucy to help pay for Bessie's fertility expenses, vet costs could easily skyrocket if we don't approach this with common-sense! The adventure continues.....along with all sorts of knowledge about the reproduction of cows, which I certainly didn't expect to find fascinating.....but here we are! Laura http://dykstrasfarm.blogspot.com/