Cow Tripping

I plan to make this a quick one, short and unpleasantly embarrassing, especially whenever I talk about cows. Don't ask me why I have them on my mind. Reader discretion is advised... as in this is going to be a naughty post even if it is true.

As I might have mentioned in many a previous childhood story, we raised livestock on the farm. Cows. Pigs. Chickens. What I didn’t mention were the types of cows we raised. Beef cattle. The whole sitting on a stool and milking a dairy cow never appealed to my father -- neither did the whole breeding and birthing thing. So he would purchase calves, raise them while fattening them up, and then take them to the slaughter house.

Guess whose chore it was to raise the calves?

Now, raising calves isn’t any different from raising babies. They all drink milk. Much like the powdered Carnation and Similac baby formulas bought at the store, the calves had the same thing but it came in one-hundred pound bags. I would scoop out the powdered formula, dump it into a “special bucket,” and add warm water until mixed. Then I carried the bucket up to the barn and hooked the metal handle onto the post so the calf could drink.

Okay, so this “special bucket” had a very interesting design to it. Picture in your mind of a small metal bucket with a wire handle. Since all babies drink from nipples - or in a calf’s case, teats - this bucket had a sort of, um... device at the bottom of one side where an opening in the bucket allowed the milk to pass through.

Sigh. Okay, so imagine the rubber part of a baby bottle nipple. It was a little like this but it was larger to fit the calf’s mouth. It, um, damn...

Well, the teat part wasn’t the same like you would see on a regular milking cow. Damn! Okay, I’ll just say it.

The teat looked like a rubber penis attached to the metal bucket.

It was much smoother sticking straight out at attention with the milk inside. The calf would stick the whole thing into its mouth and suckle, occasionally ramming its head into the bucket side trying to force more milk out like it would against its own mother. Wham! Wham! Wham!

Now, if the calf did this too much and released the teat too often it usually meant there was a clog. Sometimes it happened whenever the powder would clump up without fully dissolving. So I had to dump out the milk, put hot water into the special bucket to clean it, and then “work” the teat to make sure the liquid would come out. By “working” the teat, I had to wrap my fingers around the... yeah... and pump until it sprayed liquid – and at quite a distance too. Then I placed the milk back inside and fed the calves.

Of course the day I return to blogging would be the day I post something like this. Yeah, okay. I promise something nice and wholesome for my next post. Or at least not so embarrassing... look at that thing sticking out. Why on earth did I make this post?