Every year, the ranch gets bum calves because a mother has twins and can't care for both, because the mother dies, or because the calf gets too sick for the mother to take care of it. In these cases, we need to take care of them
Most people won't need this blog, but if you get a bum calf from a near by ranch or want something entertaining to read, here is how you take care of them.
To take care of a bum calf you need:
1) a place to keep the calf. This can be a pasture with a fence with small enough holes that coyotes can't get in or a stall in a barn. If you calve during the winter, you will need to find a way to keep them warm. Straw is good because they can bed down in it, and you need to have a windbreak that they can hide behind like a stone wall or a fence without holes.
2) calf milk formula or a milk cow. Unless you want to buy whole milk from the store at great expense of both your wallet and your calves health, you need to buy one of these two solutions. There may be more ways, or variations of these, but I find that these work the best. If you have a good milk cow then you can graft your bum calves onto her to have an easy solution. I know people who have gotten three bum calves on their milk cow. We use the calf milk formula, because we don't have a milk cow. We get our formula from Big R, a store in town, and we mix it with warm water like a protein drink. This 'milk' then goes into calf-sized baby bottles. At first it's hard to get them to drink from the bottles because they don't understand. You have to force it down their throats by holding them still with your legs and tipping their heads back to pour down the milk. After a few weeks they will be running to you even when you don't have a bottle.
3) time. We feed our calves at least two times a day, with two bottles each. By having bum calves, you’re giving up about an hour a day just feeding them. If one of your calves is sick, then that means more time. A sick calf usually means more equipment too, like medicine or a tube feeder. If you are feeding a calf with a tube feeder, watch a video on it first, or risk killing your calf by pouring a liter of milk into their lungs. Taking care of a calf will take months. We usually feed our calves three times a day until they put on some weight. During the fall gradually ween them off of the milk by feeding them once a day as their bodys become used to eating grass and grain.
Last year we had the luxury of having horse stalls to put the calves in. This helped because it made it easy to separate sick calves from healthy ones and still have them near each other.