Brown: Battle of the bulge takes new meaning

It was a green and growing wheat field. The cattle were fat and happy. But all was not as it should be.

Wheat cattle never let up. If you finally get them through the dying-of-pneumonia stage and into January, they can move into the next phase of dropping dead. Bloat.

Audra Brown

Down on the Farm

Now, bloat is hard to diagnose in a population of good, increasingly fat wheat calves. The best eaters look round just because they are that fat — and that’s a good thing. But there’s the good, solid, yet gelatinous roundness of belly that you want to see, and then there’s the tight, asymmetrical, bad-news bulge that indicates a severe ailment related to an excess of gastric pressure.

You think you see it and dismiss it as your eyes playing tricks and your nose taking a stand, but as many times as you almost see it, you can’t miss it when it’s really there. No excuses when it’s higher than there back. Fat, you see, is heavy and obeys gravity, generally sagging if it can. Gas, on the other hand, does not go down so nicely.

Now, onto the nitty, gritty, smelly solutions. There isn’t a good one, trust me, but there are a few equally shower-desire-creating options.

Non-emergent cases are those where you have time, help, and facilities to get the puffed-up patient into the corrals or other location where a chute or gate can be used to make the patient stay put. In those cases, upon patient capture, the garden-hose method is employed. If you don’t keep a six-foot cut of garden hose around, you’ve never had to deflate a bloated calf. I call it a Garden-scope, even though you can’t see anything. Best practice is to coat it in cooking oil and start threading it in behind the teeth and over the tongue. Go gentle, make sure you take the proper tube when options are felt, and I suggest keeping the outside end as far from your face as you can.

You know it when you get it to the right spot and that noise and smell is as rank and unforgettable as you might imagine — and probably a little worse.

The calf goes down, the garden hose goes back in the tool box, and you try not to find anymore that day.

Audra Brown is a certified bovine-deflation expert, a skill to have, but hope to never need. Contact her at:

[email protected].