One of those “everything I touch dies” kind of nights

This one has animal death, guys. Think of this as the opposite of all those “shiny new kitten!” threads.

The day was pretty good: I got to sleep in, sewed a little, wrote a little, shaved my brother’s head (at his request), spent some time reading and tooling around on the Internet. Lazy Sunday.

And then I went out to do chores and things got bad. I do evening calf feedings, and usually it’s enjoyable: I go out, mix up milk replacer, get licked and bawled at, one of them tries to eat my shorts, and we end the night either full of milk (the calves) or covered in it (me). But lately, it’s been less than fun.

To start, a lot of the calves coming in have something wrong with their eyes. Their pupils are misshapen, so instead of being round, they’re like cats’ eyes. It worries me, but the vet says not to worry about it, they can see fine, and they’re healthy otherwise. But it still gives me pause, and I wish it wasn’t there.

On top of that, there’s some sort of outbreak of something among the calves on the farm. Over the past couple weeks, three or four have died. With three of them, they were fine for the morning feeding, and got sick some time during the day – fever, don’t want to eat, diarrhea, too weak to stand – and were dead by the next evening. (The fourth may have died from unrelated pneumonia. We haven’t gotten the cultures back yet.) It’s so quick you barely have time to treat them before BOOM. They’re dead.

So, tonight, the third (or fourth) calf died, and two more got sick. One of the ones that’s sick I don’t think is going to make it through the night, but the other one probably will, though who knows about tomorrow night. The vet is coming tomorrow, so we’ll know what to do . . . maybe. If he knows what to do.

Since that calf died and two more got sick tonight, that means I got to spend time sanitizing absolutely everything it might have touched with scalding water and bleach. No biggie, it had to be done. Then Dad told me that I had to help my brother finish up milking, because Dad had something he had to do. So I was down the barn for about three hours longer than I usually am, and it was well past dark by the time I was ready to leave.

There are five little roly-poly barn kittens that follow me down every night from the back porch to the barn, and then follow me up when I’m done with chores. There are two calicos, and a black and white tuxedo, a gray and white one with faint tiger stripes on the gray parts, and a little, funny orange and white one. The orange and white one is the run of the litter, and he’s about half the size of the other ones. They’re about ten weeks old, and they’re absolutely precious. Everybody loves them, and none of them have names because we can’t agree on any.

Because I was in the barn for so long, the kittens hadn’t gone up to the house to sleep under the porch like they usually do, so they were still roaming the barnyard. We were done with milking, so Dad started to back the truck up and I saw a little orange and white flash of fur under the truck. Before I could yell at Daddy to stop, the kitten ran under the wheel of the truck.

At first, I thought the truck just got his tail or one of his legs, because the kitten was running so fast. He ran into some weeds at the edge of the driveway and then just stopped. Dad, my brother, and I all ran over to him, and I crouched down to see if he was all right.

I told Dad that I thought one of the kitty’s legs was broken, and he’d probably be OK. Dad told me to “pick him up, just to be sure.” So I did, and it was obvious that he wasn’t going to be all right. It looked like maybe his intestines had burst and his back was broken.

I said, “Daddy, I don’t think he’s going to make it,” and my dad started to cry, which was almost as terrible as the incontrovertible fact that the kitten was going to die. (Just as an aside to all those people who think farmers don’t care about animals: They do. Oh god, they do. It’s nearly impossible to be in close contact with animals day after day without loving them on some level.)

Dad and my brother left at that point, and I don’t blame them. I stayed, petting the kitten until he slipped away. While I was petting him, he started to purr, and I lost it. Until then, I was thinking, “It was accident, and they happen, and I can’t fix this. I’ve just got to let him go.” But then he started to purr, and it was terrible.

I can handle calves dying, because it happens. They usually give you some warning. But kittens are different from calves. Calves don’t curl up in your lap and knead at your leg or chase flies or twine around your ankles. Kittens don’t weigh more than you do in two weeks on a liquid diet or knock you over into manure or mistake your hair for hay.

The worst part is that there was absolutely nothing I could do for the kitty to put him out of his misery. The nearest emergency vet clinic is over an hour away and the closest small animal vet is a half hour away and it’s Sunday night. The large animal vets sure as hell weren’t going to open up the clinic or make a call to euthanize a kitten. (The dog we had before this one had brain cancer, and the vet wouldn’t come to put him down when he went into his final decline. He told Dad to shoot the dog. We found a different vet.)

I feel like I have the touch of death, because all these calves are dying and I can’t stop it, and then my favorite kitten got run over. And I couldn’t help him. All I could was pet him until he stopped purring.

{{{{Purl }}}}

Kitten had someone to love him and stroke his fur while he passed. You did good.

(Those aren’t tears in my eyes dammit…allergies…yeah…)

:frowning: I’m so sorry. I’m glad you were strong enough to be there for the kitten at the end, though. I’m sure somewhere in his kitty mind, he was grateful to have a friend with him.

{{{{Purl}}}} It’s OK, honey you did good. You did the best you could for the kitty, and made his passage as easy as you could.
As far as the calves go, you are following all the right biosecurity protocols. Sometimes, shit just does happen.

Oh my, {{{Purl}}}. I’m so sorry. You did the best thing possible. If it helps at all, if the kitty’s back was broken, s/he didn’t feel any pain.

I’m so sorry. Thank you for being strong enough to stay with him until the end.
{{{Purl}}}

I agree, thank you for being strong enough to do this - you’re not to blame for anything here.

Anyone else besides Merry get misty reading that? Well, I did. So sorry, Miss Purl. That’s a rotten experience, and I’m sorry you - and the kitten - had to go through it.

So sorry.

That is all, I guess… I’ve got nothing to say.

Just like there was nothing you could do. Still sucks :frowning:

Well, hell. I’m so sorry, Purl.

I’m crying with you, Purl. Your dad…he sounds like a classy guy.

Mild, compared to what you are going through, but . . .

I hit a bird while driving to church yesterday morning. (Or maybe I should say the bird hit my car). At any rate, one minute I’m sailing along at about 70 mph–a little faster than the limit, but there is almost no traffic on a normal Sunday morning at 8:30 so why not. The next minute, I’m seeing a bird come awful close to my car–then smash into the windshield. Leaving me with a smeared windshield and a headache–the kind that I usually get from driving too fast over speed bumps–except worse. And some feelings of sorrow and guilt, because I either killed or injured a bird–didn’t go back to see–even at that time on Sunday morning traffic isn’t light enough that I want to drive slow enough to look for a bird on the side of the road. And if it was seriously injured but not yet dead, I didn’t want anything to do with it, and I didn’t feel badly enough to want to take it to a vet if it was injured enough to benefit from care and not so injured that it would be kinder to put it out of its misery . . .

How much worse to be in contact with animals and expect to see them grow up, and then know that you won’t.

Damn, I hate to cry at work. I’m so sorry about your critters. :frowning:

Thanks for the sympathy, guys. Last night was pretty rough, and sleep was not forthcoming, my choice to listen to Celtic “love” songs not taken into account. Today has been much better. Kitten funeral detail is set for tomorrow.

On the calf front, the vet came this afternoon. He did a post mortem on the dead calf and looked at the others. His tentative diagnosis is that it’s bovine viral diarrhea, which would explain both the weird eyes and the sudden death. He took some cultures, and we’ll know for sure next week. Any way it goes, it’s more scalding water and bleach for me.

Dung Beetle, my dad is a classy guy. My parents taught me to treat animals with dignity and respect, but my dad taught me to love them.

I agree, Purl. You did good.

I think the hardest thing that can ever be asked of us is to stand witness and comfort while someone or some being that we love dies. It means so much that you loved that baby kitten in life and didn’t leave it to die alone because you were scared or wanted to spare yourself further hurt.

Sorry it doesn’t help much, but another vote for “you did well”.

(a) One of the saddest things I’ve ever seen was a cat (full grown, and a stranger to me) dart out into the street and get run over by a car. And like Purl’s experience, it kept running for a few seconds afterwards, so we thought for a moment it might be OK. Yikes. Your kitten was at least lucky to have you be there for it at the end.

Oh, and dying calves is sad also, but, like you said, for someone reason, not nearly as much so as a kitten. Especially right after I just read the “awwwwwwww” thread.

(b) So I came into MPSIMS to post a random thread about some random actual mundane and pointless thing, and now I can’t without feeling like the hugest insensitive douchebag in the world. Thanks a lot :frowning:

Until you get the diagnosis back from the vet, be sure to do everything reasonable about fly control. I had 42 calves on the bottle once, in separate pens, and lost six of them to BVD. Flies were spreading it.

Sorry about the kitten. It’s good that he had someone to purr to.

I feel your pain, Purl.

I worked on a commercial dairy, milking approximately 300-330 Jerseys*, for a couple of years and can attest to the impotence one feels when calves start keeling over. I wasn’t in charge the rearing the calves, but often helped out with the grunt work if I didn’t have chores to do, and it really was really sad to see animals that young suddenly ill and, often only a few days later, dead.

The part that consistently got me was that this occurred despite all the precautions taken (colostrum soon after birth, meticulous vaccinations, pertinent medications as soon as illness was suspected, electrolytes if needed). This wasn’t some backward farm where treatments were just conjectures; the owners, a pair of brothers, both had degrees (one in Animal Nutrition and Dairy Sciences, I believe, and the second in Crop Management) with semi-weekly visits by a very knowledgeable veterinarian (whose wife and 2 of his children were also vets, btw). The man in charge of the calves wasn’t ‘educated’, but he had spent 20 years (basically his whole adult life) tending to them, and his vast experience showed in his ability to detect the onset of an illness and predict its cause, as well as his talent for coaxing difficult newborns to ‘eat’. Yet, despite all these things, calves would die more often than I thought they ‘should’. It really taught me that life is more fragile than people tend to believe, and, when man interferes with ‘natural’ processes, no matter how conscientious his methods, he is often disrupting it and mother nature has no qualms about announcing this fact with cruelty. Very sad overall and I think the experience has left me somewhat benumbed to death (of animals), in a way that people who haven’t seen such things can’t comprehend.

*for the uninitiated, Jersey cattle are significantly smaller than Holsteins (the big, spotted white/blacks that people traditionally associate with milk), and their calves are notoriously less hardy.