Duct Tape "Identity Tags" For Calves

Duct Tape "Identity Tags" For Calves LIVESTOCK Handling 34-1-29 Last winter we had severely cold, windy weather while we were calving. In order to keep some of the newborn calves from freezing to death, our son and his wife had to thaw and warm dozens of calves in the little trailer house they use as a æcow camp' while they're here at our ranch during calving season. Sometimes they'd have five or six new babies in the trailer at once, warming and drying by the wood stove, feeding them colostrum via bottle or stomach tube before taking them back outside to their mothers. In order to make sure they never had a mix-up or confusion as to which calf was which û since a cow knows her own calf by smell and would refuse to take one back that wasn't hers û they used duct tape to tell them apart. They didn't want to put ear tags into these new babies during the cold spell, since some of the ears might have already been frozen and the calves might lose ear tips and possibly their tags. So they came up with a little trick û writing the mother's number with a marking pen on a piece of duct tape and sticking it onto the back of the calf. Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Heather Thomas, P.O. Box 215, Salmon, Idaho 83467 (ph 208 756-2841).

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