So we recently had two of our steers butchered so we have in our freezers full of all sorts of beef,
like a few hundred pounds of meat.
So obviously we were not planning on butchering another cow for a long while.
Well, but unfortunately we had to butcher our 7 year-old lowline angus, Nutella last week.
So this is what happened. A few weeks ago, our neighbor's young bull kept getting out of their property and coming to our property to attempt to get with our cows. I mean, multiple times within a week and at times multiples times a day kind of thing. I'm not sure what kind of breed he is but he's definitely a little bit bigger than our cows. At first we really didn't want him at our place because we didn't want our cows to get pregnant at that time and we also have 2 calves/heifers that we were afraid that the bull would try to mount and would definitely crush those calves. But then we were tired of dealing with the whole the bull escaping and running to our place and having to text our neighbor every time to come get his bull. So we told our neighbor that we would let the bull stay in our pasture for a little bit and let them breed. We put that bull and our two cows (Nutella, and Hazel) in the back pasture so we could keep him away from our calves. But then he kept jumping the fence to try to get to our calves as well. He just kept going back and forth between the front and back pastures between the cows and the calves. Luckily he didn't get to the calves.
When we first
agreed to let the bull stay at our pasture we didn't think he would hurt
our cows. I don't know if he's just really aggressive like that when
it comes to mounting a cow, or if he's just young and "inexperienced"
and didn't know what he was doing, if you know what I mean.
But on the second day that bull had been in our pasture our other neighbors texted me and said they saw Nutella was limping really bad. The bull hurt her trying to mount her. So we went back there to check on her and sure enough she was limping really bad. Needless to say, I texted my neighbor right away and told him what was happening and asked him to come and get his bull that day, which he did. But at that point the damage was already done. We were hoping to give her a few weeks to see if it got better, but it didn't. She lost a little bit of weight due to her decrease in mobility. So we finally took her to the animal hospital an hour away to go get checked out, with the intention that the vet might be able to do something to help.
The vet did take a look at her leg and confirmed that it was broken, unfortunately. He gave us a couple of options. 1. Put a cast on her leg. But where the break on her leg was, even with a cast it would come off easily, plus given that she was already 7 almost 8 there's no guarantee that the leg would heal. She would never be able to breed naturally probably, and her quality of life would be significantly reduced. 2. Give her pain medication but it would wear off in 24 hours. 3. Either sell her or butcher her, which he said, and we agreed would probably be the most economical option, and make the most sense.
After we left the
animal hospital we called our butcher right away to see if there's any
possible way they would have a spot available for us to drop off a cow
for butchering that same day or the next day. I was very surprised but
think it was a blessing that they told us we could drop Nutella off that
afternoon. Our butcher is usually 6 months to a year scheduled out so
it was a miracle that they could fit us in that day! We were not
prepared to say good-bye to Nutella that day but things just turned out
that way, unexpectedly.
