Happy Weanerdays!
So, it has begun. “It,” being the first members of the CCNF birth class of 2015 getting weaned from their dams. One of the great advantages to managing our crias the way we do, is that when an animal is weaned, it is almost always in the company of the other crias it has grown up with since birth. This is the nice byproduct of birthing out in groups of 15 moms and their respective babies. I do suppose there is always the chance of a solitary male or female cria having to go off on its relative lonesome (they are weaned into two separate groups by gender), on that rare occasion when mother nature decides to really go on a streak/slump and we have a group of expectant dams that has virtually all girls (that’d be the streak) or all boys (that’d be the slump) – but even then, the would-be orphan would probably just end up getting weaned with the next oldest group of crias. In any event, by the time these not so knee-biterish (many pushing 100 lb.) knee biters are removed from their mother’s care, they are always at least 6 months of age, and for the most part, their dams have already done much of the work for us.
Yes, there are of course some heavy hearts in both the now cria-less dam group, as well as in the newly formed weaner feed groups but everyone seems to turn the page pretty quickly. Though perhaps less so this year with the bizarrely mild weather (because nothing says White Christmas like 50 degrees in Vermont), we do often have some of our nursing dams who have given up considerable body condition nursing their babies, and removing the fuzzy-wuzzy parasites we love, allows those girls to start bulking up again in earnest. That is doubly important, as most of them have already been supporting a second cria in utero.
At least where the first batch of young boys was concerned, they seemed to take their weaning yesterday quite well. Jen and Kim took some time showing them that they had an entire open paddock in our Stud Barn pasture to themselves, a nice change from the relatively cozy confines of the drylot that surrounds the Arena this time of year. Once they fully grasped that, they spent lots of time just sprinting up and down the length of the field. For the moment, those weaner boys also have the pleasure of sharing their new barn with our show females on the other side of the fence. Not a completely bad gig. I liken it to a bunch of 12 year old human males being dropped off at a beauty pageant. Perhaps something to aspire to, gentlemen?
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