"Oh we'll kill the old red rooster when she comes..."

A couple of weeks ago, I told Cliff, "We don't need that rooster any more.  I don't want any more baby chicks this year, and that guy is taking up space and eating feed.  We could kill him and have a pot of noodles."

Cliff has heard about things that "we" are going to do more than once, and since the baby was here that day, he was pretty sure "we" meant "Cliff".  But he is a dutiful husband, and agreed to butcher the rooster.  He remembers nothing about the process we went through with the eight-week-old chickens in May of 2013, since he was sick as a dog, had tubes coming out of him, and seriously thought he was going to die.  

I told him, "You will have to chop his head off, because it won't come off easy like those young chickens.  But just skin him, so "we" won't have to pluck feathers, and it shouldn't be too difficult.  

The baby and I went out to check on him a couple of times.  He didn't look too happy.  Later, he brought the carcass in, soaking in a bucket of clean water, informing me that it wasn't easy to skin the old bird.  So evidently, that's something that only works with young poultry.  

I heated up a big pot of water, and while it was getting to the boiling point, I Googled "how to cook an old rooster".  The first site I clicked on said to boil him for six hours and he would be fine.  Wow, seriously?  Six hours?  Oh well, I can do that.  

The water boiled, I put the rooster in, and then went back to the computer to see what other people suggested for cooking an old rooster.  Oh boy.  Everybody says I should have let him age in the refrigerator for two days, because if you cook a chicken immediately after the kill, rigor mortis has set in and he will be tough.  And then they all said to cook him for a couple of hours.  

"Well," I told Cliff, "maybe cooking him for six hours will make up for us not putting him in the refrigerator for two days."

Cliff didn't look too happy.  I said, "I remember Mother always killed chickens on Saturday that she was going to fry on Sunday.  That's only one day."  

Cliff said nothing.  

So I checked the rooster after three hours.  He was tough.  My spirits soared, though, when after five hours I poked a fork in the bird and the meat literally came off the bone.  

"Ah-HA!  We'll have noodles tomorrow."  

Unfortunately, when I tried to eat a bite of the meat that fell off the bone, it was stringy, and I couldn't chew it.  

I saved the broth, which was very tasty, and froze it.  The pigs got the bird and were grateful.  When it's time to get rid of my old laying hens this fall, I will offer them for sale on Craigslist for $5 each, and if I get no response, I will offer them free.  If I get no takers at that point, they will be sacrificed, but not butchered and eaten.  There will be no more old birds dressed for eating at Woodhaven Acres.  

Thank You, God, that I wasn't born in the olden days when my life depended on killing chickens for meat.  I have a new admiration for my mother, my aunts, and my grandma, none of whom sent their clueless husbands out to kill a chicken while they watched a baby.  They did the deed themselves, and did it well.

OK, here's the bad news

Bad news from a cattle standpoint.  But then, there are so many things more important than cattle dying, I hesitate to even share the information.  

As I explained before, Crystal got out with a neighbor's bull when she was only eleven months old, which is younger than a heifer should be bred.  When the grandson went looking, and finally found her in his second day of searching, she was on a bluff at our fence wanting to come home.  He and his buddy tried their best to get her down off that bluff to a place where it would have been easy to get her through the fence, but she would not leave that spot.  She was nowhere near the neighbor's herd, and the grandson said there was no way she would go down to where they were.  I should have known better, but I assumed she had not made contact with the bull.  

At least three months went by before we realized that she had no doubt been bred, because she wasn't coming in heat at three-week intervals as she should have.  By this time I wasn't sure of the exact date when she had been with the bull, so I wrote down two dates.  

We put her in the lot July 19.  We watched and watched.  If she had been bred on the first date I wrote down, she would have been due the 24th.  I had earlier ordered tickets for the Sidney Rodeo in Iowa, for August 1.  We were going to leave Friday morning and return Saturday by noon.  The cow seemed to be showing no signs of calving, but hey, even if she had the calf while we were gone, she'd probably be fine, right?  

Our motel was in Shenandoah, just fourteen miles from where the rodeo was.  In this whole general area, we had no cell phone signal.  Just before 11 P.M. we got back to the motel, where the wi-fi allowed me to get on Facebook.  There was a message from the grandson from earlier in the afternoon:  "Your cow is having her baby."  

I'm not going into details, but the grandson, who was already sleep-deprived from spending hours after work every day working on the old house, ended up trying to help a heifer have a bull calf that, it turns out, was about 1/10 her weight.  This is a fellow who has never had anything to do with cows, although he says he remembers watching me help a cow have her calf when he was just a little boy.  I gave him the motel phone number, so we were able to actually talk instead of message on Facebook.  

It was futile.  They got the calf out as far as its hips and it would come no further.  Cliff gave them some tips, and they finally got it out, but of course after all of that, it was dead.  The grandson called me to tell me the calf was a goner, and he said, "I think the cow isn't far behind him."  

As it happened, the cow, Crystal, was just worn out.  The next day she was walking around, eating, chewing her cud, and laying beside her dead baby a lot.  

There is a dairy at Higginsville, and I called a number in the phone book and left a message telling them I had a cow that lost her calf and wondered if they had any bull calves.  Bobby calves are a ridiculous price now, but at least the cow would have a baby to raise, and her milk wouldn't go to waste.  They never returned my call.  

Crystal is only half Jersey, so she isn't going to give a ridiculous amount of milk.  I could probably just dry her up and she'd be OK.  Yesterday I had Cliff go to the barn with me, because I wasn't sure how she would act when I put the kicker on her.  We got her in the stanchion with some feed, Cliff adjusted the anti-kick device to her size, and put it on her.  He got probably a quart of milk from her, although she certainly didn't enjoy his efforts.  This morning I got about twice that much, and she behaved a little better.  She was never a pet like most of my cows are, because I never intended to milk her.  We'll see how she comes along.  The pigs would love to have some milk, I'm sure.  I wouldn't mind having some raw milk around the house myself.       

She went through a lot, Friday night, and I would be surprised if she's able to ever have a calf again due to the trauma that occurred.  I think we will have a vet assess the situation tomorrow.  If worse comes to worse, we can always butcher her.  We could just wait and see what happens, but if she were to get an infection she could go downhill rapidly, and we wouldn't want to butcher a sick cow.  

So there you have it.