None of the outside life for them, they come in through a doggie door, and sleep on the couch. The couch is, as I barely recall a rich tomato red, but that is rarely visible, for I keep it covered in throws, quilts and old blankets. Why I bother escapes me at the moment... It might make more sense to cover up the dog traces when people come, rather than hoping that I can uncover a pristine couch.
But this is a farm, with chickens, pigs, sheep, cattle, horses and a donkey in residence. The horses and donkey are pets, just like the cats. The rest are expected to produce... something... in exchange for the feed and care that keeps them alive.
While it is a hobby farm, surrounded by real farms and ranches, I had to learn a lot about raising livestock. One of the most important discoveries here is that they are NOT like dogs. I am fairly good with dogs. I have raised them, trained them, gotten them to get along and adapt to new situations, and there are few dogs that intimidate me or defy me for long. I still have things to learn, but knowing that keeps me searching for new techniques and evaluating my methods, and I think that is a good thing.
Now if you live far from the farm or ranch setting and see the place only while zipping by going 65 miles per hour, you don't get the full effect.
Keeping animals is work.
(Sure a labor of love, but you don't feel or smell so lovely most of the time.)
I feed morning and night, (which is the norm), and milk then as well. I milk by hand, which is a fading art. I learned that from a book, mind you, so it is not something that is very difficult, as long as you have a cow that is well mannered about the procedure, but it is something that for 10 months of the year must be done at 12 hour intervals, come sleet, heat, flies, or cramps.
Even the best cow has an off day, and I tend to have more of them. Even the nicest cow lies in her own manure and requires that you wash the udder off, which results in a lot of waste and laundry.
Let me tell you a little about milking a cow:
First, why?
There is nothing like the taste of real fresh warm milk to make me smile. Just smelling it puts me in a happy mood. Then there is the butter, cream (whipped or ice or cheese), and the cheese, and of course when you are milking, there is a calf.
They are cute, those little bull or heifer calves.
Especially when they are Jersey calves, and since I have a registered Jersey cow, they are especially cute. They are also tasty, later on.
If you have not quite put the whole calf-milk thing together, don't feel bad. I don't know how many people think that cows give milk so we have milk to drink. It simply doesn't occur to them that lactation follows gestation, and before the milk flows, you have a calf born. The first two days or so the cow has a huge udder, and produces colostrum, and rather little of it, compared to the capacity of the udder, but then it changes over to milk, and rivers of it.
Buckets full.
My cow Ruby is a well bred production cow. One quarter of her udder is 'dry', due to scar tissue after bad mastitis. That happened at the dairy she was working at before I had time to bring her onto our place, but it could have happened here as well. Mastitis can be caused by many bacteria, and can be mild or severe, just depending on circumstances. Although she works on only three quarters, Ruby produced up to 6 gallons of milk a day, and to prevent another mastitis infection, that milk must be removed completely at least twice a day. That is a lot of squeezing teats.
You either develop a firm grip quickly, or go the mechanical route.
We actually have a milker, along with the vacuum pump to run it. But the thing is heavy, even when empty I can barely carry it up and down the stairs, and it requires a thorough cleaning twice a day, which means lugging it from the barn to the house, and that is simply too much work. So I milk into stainless steel buckets, which are easier to carry, disinfect and handle.
Milking starts with a cleaning step, and disinfecting the teats in a special solution that looks like betadine, and is called teat dip, or specifically pre-dip, since it is used before milking. After letting the stuff work for a bit the teats are wiped off, and dried. Then a few squirts from each quarter are put into a cup, examined (visually and by smell) and discarded. This is called stripping. By removing the milk that is already in the teat, bacteria are flushed out, and possibly contaminated milk is removed. Often the cats get the stripped milk, they eat mice full of bacteria, so they don't complain. Now the cow is ready to milk. To keep her standing still, I feed her her grain ration during the milking. It has to be timed, I give her a third of the grain at a time, so she doesn't finish eating before I am done milking. She gets restless, and trying to milk a cow that is rummaging around is nearly impossible.
Ruby is very calm and has not stepped into the bucket or kicked (which is good considering where my head is and the fact that cows kick forward as well as backward with precision and force).
I milk into a smaller bucket (about 1.5 gallon capacity), and dump that milk into the larger bucket that is left out of the way and covered. That way, should we have an accident (which can be a kicked over bucket or a chunk of manure ending up in the bucket, or flies, or you name it) I should still have some useable milk.
The first milk about 3/4 of a gallon is for the calf, Ozzy. He is a big bull calf that needs to be dehorned and castrated, and I really need to get to it. I can't dehorn (don't have the tools, practice), so I wait with the castrating and vaccinating as well, until help arrives. Ozzy drinks out of the bucket now, but he started out with a huge calf bottle, and it is usually Harold's job to feed the calf.
When it becomes difficult to get a squirt of milk out anymore, another stripping step (this time to remove all the milk) is done. The milk contains more water initially, and more fat at the end, so a calf is first re-hydrated, then gets a nice calorie rich dessert to keep it full until the next nursing time, that is how nature planned it. So I want the last milk, it has more cream.
Then the teats are dipped into post-dip. This is ticker stuff, coats the teats and seals the milk canal.
Now we are all done but the clean up.
Ruby gets returned to her pen. She usually drinks water right away. I often brush her and pet her for a bit. The brushing is not simply because I like her, although I do. A clean cow is much easier to milk.
Her pen is mucked out, and fresh straw is spread. I climb into the hayloft and throw down some hay for Ruby, then I give some grain to the calf.
The milking area is hosed down (not fun in the winter). The feed bucket is refilled.
The milk gets carried through the gauntlet of dogs to the house where it is filtered and chilled. The stripped milk is given to the various waiting cats and dogs, which is how we can escape them.
The buckets/strip cup/calf bottles are scrubbed, cold rinsed, hot rinsed and disinfected. The teat wipes go into the bleach-sanitary cycle (almost boiling water) laundry. The buckets etc are returned to the cupboard in the barn and stored upside down.
Milking itself doesn't take all that long, but all the prep and cleanup make it a 20 to 30 minute job, for two people. It takes me about 40 minutes by myself, since the calf is not fed until after I have all the milking done, and the pens are cleaned up not while but after the buckets were washed, and so forth. Milk letdown is for only 10 to 15 minutes, so all the milking has to be done in that time, or else you have a very uncomfortable cow at risk for mastitis.
A cow is milked for 10 months of the year. The last two months before she calves you 'dry her up'. You gradually reduce milking, then stop. You have to be careful and watch for indication of infection. The drying up allows the energy and calcium stores that used to go into the milk to go toward the calf that is growing in the cow. This insures a healthy well grown calf.
Cows estrus cycle is 21 days, and their gestation is nine months, very similar to humans. I can use my 'due date' calendar for woman or cow, but it tends to insult the former when I do that.
After the milking, I feed and water the sheep and pigs, who also live in the same barn, and then we (dogs and I) trot out the quarter mile to the horses. The chicken coop is on the way. Feed and water them and back to the house, because the dogs now want their food. While they eat I clean the eggs and put them away. Then I have my coffee in the morning or dinner at night. In the morning there is another trek out to the horses to put them to the hay feeder or the pasture they are to spend their day on. I have to feed one horse and donkey separate from the other two, since two are young and fat and donkey and Chigger are very very old and can't keep weight on. Although lately donkey is fat and my old horse is getting thinner...
All this is not work, but fun when the skies are dry, the sun is up, the wind is still.
But come fall or winter or spring, well there are days when I get snow or ice blown into my ears, can't see a thing because my eyes froze shut, slug through ankle deep mud and mire and usually hurt my pride during a slip and fall. Or I get knocked down by a horse, or stepped on by donkey or a cow, or butted by a sheep. Or the pigs need their trough cleaned, and they knock me over. There are times when I curse an awful lot. Good gloves, coat, boots are a necessity, and yet not terribly conducive to movement and agility.
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