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☆ March 8, 2010

This was originally posted on The Daily Coyote in May 2009; I am reposting here for the sake of continuity & keeping essential Daisy details on this site!

This is Daisy and the orphaned calf (see post below).  When I put them together, Daisy barred the calf from her udder as she had never had a calf on her – at the dairy where Daisy used to live (and I am sure this is the case with all commercial dairies), cows and calves are separated immediately, and while the calves are fed their mother’s milk via bottle, it’s essentially business as usual for the cows.  So, ’twas not surprising that Daisy shooed the calf away whenever he attempted to suckle.  I milked Daisy twice a day and fed the calf her milk with a bottle.

One day, about a week and a half into it, I spotted the calf tentatively suckling Daisy!  He had been persistent enough in his attempts, and Daisy curious and calm enough in her nature, to allow this great step to occur.  And now there is no tentativeness about it.  He ambles up to her side and extends his long curving tongue, which is practically like a finger, and draws her teat into his mouth and absolutely gobbles.  For those who’ve never had an up-close view of a calf drinking off a cow, it’s really quite awesome – in the photo above, you can see the calf’s tongue reaching up and curling around the teat (his tongue is purple on the top and pink on the underside; the pink going into his mouth is the underside of his tongue, not the teat) creating a sort of seal up against the udder.  And they drink so heartily and singlemindedly that frothy milk-slobber is a given.  Daisy stands patiently with – and I may be anthropomorphising here – a look of serene fulfillment as the calf drinks from both front teats.  That’s the deal the calf and I have:  he gets the front two teats, and I get the back two.  I milk the back teats morning and evening and leave the front ones for him; he drinks from the front teats throughout the day and leaves the back ones for me.  It works fantastically.

Daisy is like a really, really, really big dog.  She comes when called and follows me around without a halter, loves to be pet and scratched, walks through the corrals and straight to the milking stall without fail, and lets me use her as a sofa. It is such a decadent yet simple pleasure to lay against Daisy, reading a book, while she herself is laying in the sun chewing her cud.

The calf is gargantuan.  I think he’s quadrupled in size in the past three weeks.  He’s still a bull calf (as opposed to a steer calf, which is a male calf that has been castrated), and he’s probably-very-most-likely going to grow up to be a bull.  One reader emailed me with the advice, “Don’t name food,” but I don’t follow directions all that well and this calf has seven names.

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