A Cow Not Much Bigger Than A Cat

The baby calf on the left is Spencer when she was about 3 days old. She is lying next to our cat Jack. They are almost the same size! Spencer was born 6 days ago on Saturday, she was also born two months early. Cows gave the same gestation as people (nine months) and Spencer was born at only nine. The cows last baby was still nursing on her when this little girl was born.

Born at 18 lbs instead of about 70 it is a miracle she is alive! She's doing good and her mom is very sweet and putting up with everything. Spencer is nursing on the cow (with help) twice a day but the vet still has to put a tube down her throat into her stomach once a day as she is not yet strong enough to nurse by herself.

The vet says he's only ever seen one calf younger than this survive in all the years he's been working as a vet. We are very hopeful and she is doing good - talk about a success story!

Emergency Dismount

I haven't written in a while, but I finally have a good story and time to write!

My friend Shelbi and I were riding and after we ran out of sticks to jump over we still wanted to ride more so I decided to ride Hank bareback. Bad idea of course, I've now ridden him three times seriously bare back and been dumped three times! Yay! (I wrote horses bareback all the time when I was younger but I seem to have an unlucky streak with Hank!)
So he was being fine and I was galloping around the field by and all of a sudden he started bucking. Since he'd been acting good I wasnt really paying the best attention and by the time I'd realized what was happening he was galloping, well pretty fast! Shelbi was standing in the field holding her horse and I managed to get him to turn enough to head towards her horse thinking he'd get to him and stop. Wrong! Prepared for him to jump to a complete stop when we got to her I was so not ready for what happened next. Instead of stopping he slammed right into her horse and spun around and kept going. I'm just claiming that I pretty much did and emergency dismount when we hit her horse but who is really prepared to smash into another horse?! And the best is I was riding in short shorts (don't ask why!) so my bare sweaty legs stuck to his sweaty skin and half of me catapulted off and the other half stuck. Oww what a stretch! This was sunday and now 5 days later I can still feel it when I walk. Then I had to spend another 30 minutes riding the bucks out of him, but I think we were successful in the end. Now to try again when my legs recover!

Hank got a snazzy new halter. I think he needs to be a halter model; you know you think so to!