How to Shoot a Cow

Megan, Sydney, Kelsey, and Caleb at the Pumpkin Patch “farm”.

How to Shoot a Cow… and other important skills (11 October 2019)

I hope everyone is doing well and staying warm. Caleb informed me today that the temperature in Baghdad (100 degrees) is 85 degrees warmer than Colorado Springs, and that’s in the evening after we’ve cooled down about 5 or 6 degrees! According to my weather app, the temperature in Idaho is about the same as Colorado. I’m getting cold just thinking about coming home to 15-degree weather! But I guess as long as I don’t have to go outside to milk cows in the cold I’ll be okay.

I noticed two things in the Embassy DFAC (dining facility) last week that reminded me of the farm. The first occurred when I entered the DFAC for lunch and medical personnel invited me into an adjoining room where they gave me my annual flu shot. This reminded me of shooting cows… with medicine (or oxytocin), of course.

Demonstration of how to hold the needle (sorry, I didn’t have an actual needle for the demo) when preparing to give a cow a shot.

The person that gave me my flu shot did a pretty good job. She told me to relax my arm, squeezed the skin, inserted the needle, injected the vaccine, and put a bandage on the injection site. Shooting cows is a similar process. We also wanted their muscles to relax for best results so we would remove the needle from the syringe, put the needle in the crook of our pointer finger, hold the needle in place with our thumb, and make a fist with the rest of our hand. Then we would take our fist and successively hit the cow several times in a large muscle area to get the muscle to relax. After a few relaxing hits, we would turn our hand and hit the cow one final time, this time needle-first, plunging the needle into the muscle. Then we would connect the syringe to inject the medicine. Now, I must mention one major difference from human and bovine shots… we never gave the cows bandages, and we definitely never gave them suckers- that would rot their teeth!

Sydney learning how to milk a cow…, but did they teach you how to give the cow a shot?

It was a little scary the first few times I shot cows (with medicine!), but I must say I got pretty good at it. It was definitely not the worst farm task, there were many less-desirable farm tasks like branding, dehorning, and castrating. Despite our great stories, it really was not all “fun and games” on the farm. Maybe Uncle Eugene should have told those stories to Taylor and Jacob so they wouldn’t think that farms are better than Disneyland.

Caleb and Megan jumping off bales of straw- that is fun, possibly better than Disneyland, and I really did that on occasion.

The second thing I noticed at the dining facility was the cleanup crew wearing tall white rubber boots. This reminded me of the tall black rubber boots we wore on the farm as we walked through the corrals, milked the cows, moved pipe, and did several other farm tasks that require walking or standing in muck or mud up to our ankles and beyond. Occasionally I would go out for a task that I didn’t think required boots, only to find out that I should have worn boots. I soon learned that it was important to be prepared. It is much easier to rinse off rubber boots than to clean up shoes… and socks… and pants… that are caked with mud or manure.

Sydney and Kelsey arriving at the farm totally unprepared to move pipe… they don’t have their boots on!

But then again, there were times it didn’t matter much that I had boots on, like the time I was running full speed through the pasture and remembered at the last second that we had recently erected an electric fence that I was about to run into. I tried stopping, but I ended up sliding right under that fence like I was a baseball superstar. The problem was that I slid right over several fresh cow patties that were soon smeared all over my skin and clothes on my side, back, and even in my hair. I picked myself up and waddled home to clean myself up. I don’t remember, but I’m sure my mom made me hose off in the yard and remove my manure-laden clothes before I was allowed inside to finish cleaning up.

So the moral of the story is…
 - Don’t judge a blog by its title
 - Don’t forget where you put the electric fence
 - Cows are better than Cheetahs because they don’t stalk you in the grass

Love you all,
Dad

PS. 11 days later I’m still waiting for a hug from my 14-year-old daughter. I guess that will need to wait two more weeks until I get home. But as she once taught me, “some things are worth waiting for”.

I hope you had a wonderful Happy Birthday Kelsey!!!

PPS. Don’t believe everything you see in the movies. You should never shoot a cow like it shows in Napoleon Dynamite!