Puney and Lil' Girl

Puney is on the right and her Lil' Girl is on the left.  Listen, I didn't come up with the names.  The geniuses at the state funded facility that was starving them came up with them.  But, alas, these are their given names and so that is what we are going with. 

  

That's Puney and she has been in poor health since we got her.  The facility had budget cuts and they were forced to cut her feed.  She was in a field with a dominate cow, so she only ate when the other cow ate all it could stand.  At the time the other cow was pregnant and Puney was nursing Lil' Girl.  We got her out of there and after weeks of feeding her hay and supplemental feed she was starting to put on weight.  She was still nursing Lil' Girl so we had high hopes of begining to milk her as soon as she gained weight and started producing more milk.  Then one morning we went by to let the chickens out on the way to church and she was laying stretched out on the ground by the hay ring.  I in my skirt and Josh in his suit, ran out to see what was going on with her.  She was foaming a little at the mouth and she could not get up.  We immediately began trying to push her up out of the mud and the muck.  Josh pulled on her horns and I pushed on her back.  We couldn't get her to stay up.  We called one of Josh's farming collegues and she was super helpful.  She explained to us that Puney had floundered (eaten until she made herself physically sick.  cows have a mechanism that will stop them when they feel full but if they have been starved for a long period of time the mechanism shuts down).  If we couldn't get Puney back up and walking around she wouldn't make it.  We got her up with a lot more work and she eventually stayed up but for her health we had to seperate her and Lil' Girl.  She stopped nursing Lil' Girl and now we were left with a hungry mouth to feed that would give us zero return.  Puney is not giving us milk and she's not a cow that you butcher for meat.  So, now we were faced with  what to do with her.  What do you do with something you get from the store that doesn't serve it's intended purpose?  You return it.  Well, for me, with livestock, that gets complicated.  (which is why we don't get rich farming)  How could we take her back to a place that I knew had practically starved her to death?  How could I sell her to someone else and let our problems become someone else's problems?   So, we kept her.  And here she is today.  Pregnant.  But her fate is not sealed.  We can't say if Puney will ever be fit to milk.  She may have her baby and still not be healthy enough to milk.  Then, no matter how I feel about it, the Farmer will have to take care of business.

But as far as my mission to have a milking cow, all of my hopes rest with Lil' Girl.  She is a beautiful milking cow.  Hopefully, in the next year or so, Lil' Girl will be old enough to get pregnant and have a baby of her own.  Then let the milking begin.