Dorothy the Hereford Cow

This is Dorothy, our favorite pet cow.  Disregarding the fact that I grew up on a ranch where we really didn’t name cattle, as all of the calves were destined for the sale pen and most of the cows were a uniform black color with no distinguishing characteristics…we now have a small enough herd with enough color variations and personalities to be able to tell them apart and call them by name.  So we have Dorothy, a glossy red and white Hereford cow.  She has a very sweet temperament, is the most laid-back and gentle cow I’ve ever seen, and our affection for her over-rules all common sense, because a smart cattleman would have sold her long ago.

We bought Dorothy’s mother in 2008, one of four purebred Hereford first-calf heifers.  We bought the heifers with their little babies at side, and bred back for a set of new ones for the following spring.  My husband went to buy them from a reputable Hereford breeder, and I didn’t see them until they were unloaded from the trailer down at the pasture we were going to keep them in for the summer.  I snapped this photo as the cows stepped out of the trailer and into their new pasture:I wasn’t especially impressed with the heifers, since my head was stuck on what I considered an exorbitant amount that we’d paid for them.  But I guess if you figure what we paid per heifer was actually purchasing three head of cattle, it wasn’t too bad of a way to start out.

From those orginal first calves, there were two heifers and two bull calves, so we kept the two heifers and sold the two bulls as steers when they were weaned.  The two heifers, the closest two to the camera, we named Dorothy and Peaches.  Dorothy is the red one with the white tail, and Peaches is the black one eating grass:

I had no way of knowing that those scrawny little calves would become so dear to us, or that they would grow up into big shiny cows someday.  Our plan was to keep the heifers and breed them, so we would have six cows having babies.  I think the name Dorothy was contrived from the one of the kids’ movies, with Clifford the Big Red Dog, and one of the characters was a tight-rope-walking circus cow named Dorothy.  Anyhow, we named the red heifer Dorothy, and decided that whenever she had a calf, when it was sold we would split the money to put into our two kids’ savings accounts for them.  This is a family picture of Dorothy as a yearling, with her mother and baby brother lying next to her:

This is Dorothy as a two year old, making friends with a newborn calf.  She has always loved the babies and she and Peaches would gather around them, licking them and welcoming them to the herd.  We were excited for the day when Dorothy would have a baby of her own.

However, the plans we had for her didn’t work out.  We sent her to be AI’d when she was a two year old, along with her best friend Peaches.  The vet said that Peaches was pregnant, but Dorothy just wouldn’t take.  We tried again a month later, but again it didn’t work out.  So as a last resort, we brought Dorothy home and turned her in with the neighbor’s bull.  We didn’t know the EPDs on the neighbor’s bull, but the calves in his pasture looked pretty small, so we just hoped for the best.  Dorothy became pregnant, and we looked forward to meeting her baby the following spring.

The day she went into labor, we were watching her and worried that she would have trouble.  We could see she had the calf’s front feet out, but didn’t seem to be making progress beyond that.  We called the vet, but he was at another farm call and we were second on his list, so we got Dorothy ready and waited.  She followed us into the corral, her head in a bucket of corn, and seemed unconcerned about the trouble she was having.  When the vet got there, he started pulling the calf, but shook his head, saying, “This cow isn’t big enough to have this calf.” 

Sure enough, her firstborn was a huge black bull calf, and no matter what we tried, we could not get him to take his first breath.  There was too much fluid in his lungs, and he didn’t respond to any of the vet’s attempts at reviving him.  Dorothy was the perfect mother, mooing over him and licking him off.  I felt so sad for her as I dragged the calf’s body out to the cornfield to let her stand with him for awhile before we disposed of it.  She was the prettiest, gentlest cow we had, but it just didn’t seem like she was going to be able to be a mother.

Peaches delivered a tiny black bull calf the next summer (the bulls they use for AI are intentionally low-birthweight so that first-calf heifers can deliver more easily.)  We saw him in the pasture lying curled up in a little ball, and when Cowboy Dad went to check on him, it scared him out of his sound sleep, and he went running straight into the fence, and through it into the bean field, he was so scared!  The kids thought it was so funny, and instantly named him Little Dummy.  He grew up into a nice steer that we sold later on and brought a very good price at the sale. 

But Dorothy remained barren as a three year old, and we tried another round of artificial insemination.  When we had the cows preg-checked that fall, we asked the vet about Dorothy.  He said she was open, and we reminded him of how she had lost her baby the previous year and hadn’t been able to get pregnant since then.  He said she would make really good hamburger.  I said, “But this is Dorothy!  She’s our pet.”  We talked about selling her, since she was such a nice big pretty cow, she would probably bring a good price.  But my husband had toured a processing plant, and said, “We could never send Dorothy to that end.”  So we just kept her, even though she was costing us money and making no sense financially at all.

The next spring, when the vet came to check the cows, I made it a point to ask him about Dorothy.  “Do you ever think she’ll be able to have a calf?  Is she prolapsed or messed up internally so she’d have a hard time calving?”  He looked at me like I was crazy, so I explained that this was the heifer whose calf he’d had to pull, and that we’d had trouble getting her pregnant ever since.  He shook his head and said, “This isn’t the same cow.”  I laughed, “Yes it is!  This is Dorothy, our pet cow.”  She had grown a lot since he’d seen her, and he was surprised.  He said she was fine to go ahead and try breeding again, and that there wasn’t anything wrong with her physically.

So she just got back from the AI vet this week, and this is what she looks like now: 

She is confirmed pregnant, has had an ultrasound, and is finally on her way to becoming a mama.  She will be six years old when she has her first live calf!  She has grown so much that she should be just fine calving, and it’s exciting to see her all round and filled out.  The AI vet feeds them silage and mixed grain, and she evidently ate full-time while she was there, because she came home roly-poly!  

Here’s my husband giving Dorothy a treat.  Dorothy is our best cow, even though she hasn’t ever earned us a cent.  She will follow you wherever you lead with a bucket, and is gentle enough to give her vaccinations without putting her in a chute.  Just hold a bucket for her, and she will do whatever you want.  That’s made her invaluable to us, because whenever we need to move the herd or load them in a trailer, we just lead Dorothy in first, and they all follow her.

I think we’ll keep her forever.

Tagged as: calves, cattle work, country lifestyle, cows