Hickory Grove Farm

We lost our first kid

When I got home last night one of Blaze’s kids was already unconscious and about dead. I walked in the house and saw her laying on the dining room table. Her breathing was shallow and she would occasionally have muscle spasms. Her nose and eyes were crusty and I was a bit surprised at how fast the pneumonia set in since she didn’t look near that bad when I checked on the herd that morning.

I offered to put her down but the vet wanted to keep her head “whole” so she could practice a surgery tomorrow that might save the other one. We figured out over the weekend that the cleft palate was not congenital in this case and actually do to the steroids we used to try to treat Blaze with last fall after she was injured. Neither of us have much hope that the surgery to fix the other kid will work but we might as well try at this point.

One thing is for certain, you realize that you’re now a farmer when you sit down to a dinner of pork and noodles and are not alarmed by the unconscious livestock that is laying where a table setting should be.