Working Ranch Blog
Jul. 13 2010, 3:20 PM
I apologize for my absence from the WR blogging world. The summer got off to a rough start when an outbreak of polioencephalomalacia (or that’s what we think it was, still not completely sure) had us scrambling. Sickness in cattle is a tricky thing and even the vet couldn’t pinpoint it exactly, but it had us riding through cattle twice a day and pulling anything that so much as held its tail funny.
It’s frustrating for a cattleman (or in my case cattlewoman) to try to help an animal only to have it die in the end. The perplexing thing about this batch of cattle is that they wouldn’t give us much chance to help them. At evening check everything would be fine, then by morning a steer might be down and so far gone it was unable to get up. The other peculiar thing about this is in the 7 years my husband’s family has been turning cattle out here, they’ve never had a single case of this mysterious deficiency-caused illness. So, for now, things seem to have straightened out and we’re hoping we won the war and not just one battle.
Got any tips on dealing with polio? Tell me at sara.gugelmeyer@gmail.com or befriend me on Facebook.
