A typical weekend at mom and dad Hoyt's

We spent this weekend with Nathan's folks in Baton Rouge. It is about 3.5 hours from our place, so it isn't too bad of a drive. Nathan drives down every six weeks or so to trim our horse's feet as well as those of his parents' two horses. This time I decided to join him. There is always work to be done and Nathan enjoys the opportunity to help his dad with whatever project he is up to that weekend, and he's ALWAYS up to something. BTW, for those of you who don't know, both of Nathan's parents are veterinarians. Nathan's father is an instructor at LSU's vet school. Through his connections at work, he has created a side enterprise to keep us all supplied with beef. While working, he occasionally comes across a calf that costs more to fix than the calf is worth, unless the owner "happens" to be able to do their own vet work. Phil (Nathan's dad) acquires these sorry souls for free or very cheap and packs them back to his place. He then patches them back together, gives them an appropriate moniker (Pegleg, Wobble Butt, Butterball, Squeaky, Parrot-mouth, etc) and fattens them up for his freezer. The process of feeding a calf is an exact science/art I may never understand, but the results are fabulous. Nathan's folks have essentially created their own mini-feedlot by providing a refuge of hope and solace for the deformed, crippled and blind. As the flow of cattle that satisfy Phil's exacting specifications are quite erratic, he will sometimes have one calf and other times two or three. To accommodate these fluxes of production, they have two 6 foot long chest freezers to house their "graduates".

This weekend we were able to help out with the newest acquired calf. Phil got this one for real cheap because she is blind in both eyes and unable to tolerate a true feedlot environment. He snatched her up and brought her home with the plan of calming her down by making her into a "bucket baby", meaning a cow that feeds right out of the bucket from your hands. Unfortunately, she did not read the "calm down" chapter of the "How to be a Cow" book and is agitated by anything that she hears, feels, sees(faintly) or smells. Due to this, she psychotically paces whenever she is riled up and burns off all the fat Phil is trying to get her to create. If he doesn't figure out how to calm her down, he is afraid she will taste like jackrabbit. So, they decided to buddy her up with the other calf they have. To accomplish this, we had to orchestrate the movement of her and her pen from one pasture to the other. It was decided to transport her via the horse trailer because herding a blind calf is misery incarnate. Phil and Nathan slowly downsized her pen until she was right behind the trailer opening, forcing her to go inside.






It was almost a train-wreck. Nathan commented that if she had got out, we would have had to shoot her to catch her. He didn't seem to be kidding. After she was loaded into the trailer we got to work relocating her pen.





We herded the other Angus calf into the new pen to be her new buddy and hopefully calm her down a bit.





When the trailer door was opened, she was out like a shot into the new pen. She was pretty nervous, but having a buddy around eventually calmed her down.



Another exciting weekend at Nathan's folks. I was happy to help and I got to hop on the back of the tracker to ride back to the barn, which is always a treat.



Most of this was written by Katy, meaning myself, however for those of you who know Nathan well you can see he has "sprinkled" his irreverant humor throughout. Hope you enjoyed this blog