October 10, 2002

The second time my helper brought in the cow to dig out green prickly pear leaves lodged in her throat, he dispensed with the sophisticated mouth spreader and hooked a crude set of nose tongs to elevate her head and used a tie rope to pry open her jaws. (If this sounds brutal, go take a short nap or a quick bath, as rescuing pear-eating bovines is not for folks of delicate nature.)

He released her from the squeeze chute just as I appeared to watch her reeling and regurgitating cactus in the hospital pen. She heaved to the point that all four stomachs pulled together. Her number brand showed her to be seven years old. Her weaned calf stood in the next pen. He was her fourth or fifth calf. From the looks of her dead hair and shriveled udder, the black birds scratching in the pens were better choices for mothers.

"What you wanna do with her?" the helper asked. An audit showed we still had one 50-pound sack of dehydrated alfalfa cubes left from feeding the last pen of prickly pear-eating ewes. (You can relax. The dreary graphic part is over.) We had enough hay in the barn to feed the first-calf heifers overnight for 60 days. The overhead bin had a thousand pounds of range cubes left over from spring, plus approximately 16 or 17 ounces of black-headed weevils per hundredweight. (Black-headed weevils test the same protein as their feed source, but they are poor in Vitamin A and low in energy.) Deer hunters' corn strewn over the floor by raccoons and ravished by mice completed the inventory.

So if we soaked the alfalfa pellets overnight and sprinkled in corn, we could soften the ration so old bristlehead could swallow and also double the bulk of the feed. To satisfy her roughage requirements, we could drop a bale off the heifers' allotment for however many weeks or months necessary to put the old sister in shape. She was weaned in 1995. No records exist of what her share of the hay came to in the weaning period, but hay was cheaper, so she still might have credit for her part.

Looking at the marketing choices short and long range, shipped next sale, she ought to hit three hundred bucks gross, less $15 worth of commission and trucking. For the past 12 years, the Angelo cow traders have seen lots of drouth cattle in worse shape than the road kill on the way to town. Those ringside gents of pivoting chairs and pungent stogies know bovine ribs and hipbones better than the Houston doctors know human hindlegs and kneecaps.

Makes a hard choice. Take about $110 to feed her hay and cubes a month. Say she brings top money for a gimpy cow of two bits a pound after healing from her addiction. No, that's not right. The way I figured the deal sitting on a feed trough on the fateful day she was hoping to die, overfeeding her hay and giving her 10 pounds of cubes a day, by Christmas we'd have a $400 feed bill in her. By selling her on the thirty-first of December, the sale could fall in either tax year. Counting those advantages, we could recover half of the feed bill and be a candidate for being humane to animals.

We'd had rain. Death loss had been high over in the oilfield. I was pretty tender on the subject of turning her out to die. I thought, and think, someday the drouth will end. Maybe enough herders left foolish enough to buy cows to cause a boom. I keep betting on the come. Sitting in the hospital pen on a feed trough, staring at a sick cow, however, makes the stark attached to reality an understatement.

No longer able to decide, I told the cowboy to keep her in the pen. I felt so lousy, I decided to go to the post office and eat in town. On the way, I stopped to look at cows along the public road. A strange cracking sound caught my attention. Hard to locate until an old sister raised her head to try to swallow what I'd guessed to be a bone. Infuriated, I picked up a stump bearing three prongs of dead roots. Hurled the stump at her with such force that had the missile landed on target, she'd have fallen to her knees. Instead, she whirled, spitting out an aluminum beer can in the motion. I thought, "Gosh-a-mighty, with deer season coming, the ungrateful black sapsuckers are going to be choking to death on the trail of cans going down this road."

Right then sealed the fate of ol' Granny the suicide prickly pear-eater. Hollowhorn beasts are going to ruin us all. I skipped lunch and read the newspaper in the city park. Left for the ranch determined to contribute one more carcass to the pet food people. One for sure to taste of raw prickly pear ...

October 10, 2002

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