For the Love of Coffee, the Orphaned Calf

  Coffee came to us after her mother died from a prolapsed uterus shortly after she was born. The cows, beautiful Brahmans, belonged to the farmer who was leasing our farm. He didn't have the time to look after her, so asked if we wanted her. This was the first time I considered saying "no" because I had spent so much time in the past 12 months scrubbing bottles, mixing milk formula and feeding babies, and had envisioned a break from parenting duties. It was not to be! When the farmer bought her to us in the back of his car and we saw her little deformed mouth and nose and heard her snuffling, we couldn't abandon her. Her sad, weeping eyes made it look like she was crying, and, of course, we instantly fell in love with her and wanted to protect her from the cold and lonely world. So now we had our first cow, and a new learning curve commenced.

                                Coffee came to us as a day old calf.

Coffee's twisted mouth and nose caused her no problems drinking or eating but she does have problems breathing at times. She was probably the most helpless and pathetic of all the orphans we had taken in. I think the idea of breeding livestock is to keep the fittest and cull the weakest, but we seem to just accumulate more of the sick and rejected and nurse them back to health. Our breeding stock gene pool may not be of the soundest quality.

                                 She loved the 'big green udder'

She probably shouldn't have been in the house, but we were her herd and she used to get lonely! We were not cut out to be the kind of farmers who view animals as commodities!

Yes, I am covered in calf snot, and loving every minute of it!

She is extremely friendly. We cannot relocate her anywhere she cannot see the house.  We tried to move her to another paddock. She refused to budge. We had to get behind her with a long pole and physically push her down the laneway, and as she went, sideways like a crab, digging her heels in all the way,  she was farting in our faces and weeing on our hands!  So breathing in that unholy odour, struggling to propel her down the lane, covered in urine, fifteen minutes later we arrived, a little greener in the face and very much relieved. When we finally got her into the paddock and closed the gate we headed back up the laneway towards the house, very pleased with ourselves and our terrific animal handling skills.
Before we had even finished congratulating ourselves at a job well done, (and probably very relieved that no 'real' farmer had witnessed our unorthodox methods), we got to the top of the lane and  there was Coffee waiting for us. She'd just jumped the fence and gone straight back home. A little skin off of her legs for her trouble, but absolutely determined that she was not going to be removed from her home paddock.
So she won. And to this day she lives with her lovely view of the house.

                                           Doo doo doo, looking in your back door...

                              Coffee's family- very nice bull.

Feeding Coffee whilst consuming coffee. Dan, the dog, looks on hoping something tasty will be coming his way too.

Coffee at one year old. Looking good and finally gaining a little weight!

Months later we retrieved Coffee's mother's skull and I turned it into a mosaic work of art. She is on display on the front porch!