Never a dull moment

The funny thing was that we were supposed to have a quick and easy herd health day last Sunday in a month when all we had to do was shots and body scoring. In the normal course of things that should have taken us maybe 5 cumulative hours to go through the 220 +/- animals on the farm right now. Yet circumstances conspired to make other plans and there we were 72 hours later yesterday morning still with the Herdsires left to do. Oh well.

After the previous day’s drama, Tuesday had dawned with the prospect of relative calm. With her cria in good hands we had a midday appointment at the vet clinic to finally get Fire Starter properly X-rayed which would lead to a decision one way or another on how to proceed with her. If you are a regular reader of this site you already know what happened next. For those that might be coming across this for the first time that tale can be found here and here.

Yeah, relative calm. I said it. At the time we maybe even felt it too. Sort of like the bad horror movie scene where the stupid kid — who you know is going to inevitably get his comeuppance — says “gee, what’s in that room over there?” We really should know better.

As Jen was heading off to the clinic with FS, I was left in charge, keeping a watchful eye on a couple of our due girls that were looking threatening. One of those girls was Pristine. Pristine is a two-time white color Champion (NAAS & Mapaca), a key member of the winning Get-of-Sire trios from a couple of years back for her dad, Archangel, as well as the last cria ever born out of our now deceased foundation female, PPPeruvian Prestige. A maiden, Pristine had lost her previous pregnancy during the winter of 2009/2010 meaning that we had nothing to show from her as of yet. If that didn’t load things enough though she was also carrying 1 of only 2 remaining SuperNova (who passed away last summer) pregnancies left here on the farm. No pressure. Of course she was going to have a routine delivery. What could possibly go wrong? Heh.

Pristine spent about an hour continuously getting up, walking around for a minute or two, and then laying back down. Not outwardly distressed but certainly not at peace either. She was at the very least in the early stages of labor. After a while she started to lay with her legs out to the side and one could see that she was starting to have contractions. Still no cria nose or bubble appeared at the business end though. Having already completed the daily breedings we needed to do at that barn and tired of reading the news on my phone, I even dared her to do something rash by quickly driving down to the house to retrieve my book. No dice. The good news was that in the end she didn’t deliver her baby while Jen was gone. The bad news was that the reason for that was because she wasn’t capable of doing so.

As soon as Jen got back from the clinic she scrubbed up and we went “in” to check on the cria and see what was happening. Some first time moms just take a while to dilate. Other times there is something as simple as a front foot hung up or a head pointed down (as opposed to through the cervix) keeping the birth from proceeding. Those are easy fixes. Not this time though. I think the only presentation that could have been trickier would have been a breech. It was an unpleasant experience holding Pristine around the neck and seeing fear come into my wife’s face as she was elbow deep into the birth canal and uterus of the female in question. Jen doesn’t scare easily anymore. That meant it was bad.  As it turned out, the cria’s neck as well as both front legs were back. Not the end of the world except for the fact that a. Pristine was intermittently pushing, creating less space every minute, and b. everytime Jen would start to get the baby’s head/neck headed towards the cervix and the exit it would jerk it back. Bad baby! In the end it took three of us (Ian, Jason, Cefi) holding/manipulating mom externally and putting a bale of bedding under Pristine’s rear end to buy Jen a little bit more space to work with inside. Though it felt like an eternity, after what was really somewhere between 10 to 20 minutes of serious intra-uterine manipulation, Pristine and Jen delivered a beautiful little 14 pound girl. The macabre comic relief while this was all going on was looking over to the nursery pen next door where the three female crias born over the last few weeks were watching this all transfixed during the entire delivery as if to say, “I’m never going to have a baby if that’s what it entails!” Perhaps not the peaceful, natural image of birth that one would want to project to the next generation. It was loud and messy.

Though technically white, the cria is still a little pink even now from the dried blood of the birth. Poor Pristine was very sore from the whole ordeal and was not initially onboard with the idea of anyone else (including her daughter) touching her anywhere on her back half. As such we did a lot of milking mom out and then giving that to the baby along a with some powdered goat colostrum in a bottle for the first 12 to 18 hours. Already showing some signs — down on pasterns, ears a little flacid — of being dismature, on Wednesday we left nothing to chance and took the little girl (for whom I have a bunch of possible names but haven’t yet decided on one) to the vet clinic to get a transfusion. Though Pristine had already started to let her cria nurse a little with some help from Jen by that morning, by evening with the baby perked up from her transfusion, she was truly able to nurse independently for the first time. We’re not out of the woods yet on this one but we are cautiously optimistic. One SuperNova birth down, one to go.