practical farming solutions… #3

the missing collar…

Here in Norway at least we're not allowed to tie up calves that are younger than 6 months of age in stalls. That makes sense – especially on a farm where no animals are tied up in stalls except while the cows are in for milking.

For the record: we have never tied up young calves on this farm, not even when such a practice was allowed. Our calves have always been contained by walls or fences until they're sold or old enough to join the cows.

However, someone seems to have overlooked the fact that we still need to restrain calves for short periods – for example during veterinary-examination and treatment, or for those short walks I've written about. The easiest way to restrain a calf is to grab it by its collar, but they don't make collars in sizes fit for small calves anymore.

So, we can get collars suitable for the quite large one year old NRF heifers, but nothing that really suits a three month old Jersey calf that's running free in the calf pen. That simply doesn't make sense since having to hunt down a frisky calf and force it into a corner so we can tie it up just to check its health or give it an injection or whatever, is unnecessary stressful for the animal. Consequently we put collars on all calves once they're around two weeks old, so we can catch them, walk them, lead them and restrain them quickly and without inducing stress, when necessary.

We have managed to get hold of a few old collars from before the “don't tie up calves” restrictions were put in place, and these work well on relatively small NRF calves. Lately we have also found some small, strong and lightweight color-coding bands that even the smallest three weeks old Jersey calf don't mind having around its neck, and these seem to solve the problem – in the name of good animal welfare.