Tagging

Hello I’m Logan Gilbert. Have you ever treated or tagged a calf? Treating and tagging newborn calves is a very important process in a farmer’s cattle operation. Baby calves can’t fend off disease on their own very well so that’s where the farmers come in. When calves are born anytime from March to May these aren’t ideal weather conditions for birth of a baby outdoors. So, farmers have to give them a variety of medicines based off of their symptoms. I will show you how to complete this task in 5 steps.

Step 1: Identify

First step, locate, identify, and diagnose what issue is and determine what vaccine should be used to treat the sickness. Some signs of this are slow moving, drooling from the mouth, or just a new born calf.

Step 2: Treating

So for example say you find a sick calf has yellow feces this sickness is called scours. To treat scours is either by pill or shot. Pill form just have to make calf swallow pill. If you do shot form fill up the syringe up with whatever medicine will treat the symptoms diagnosed. And say it calls for 10cc, with the syringe fill the needle up to 9 3/4cc on the marks on the syringe.

Step 3: Catching Calves

Next is to catch pin and hold the calf down. Not allowing them to squirm or wiggle around. If possible the safest way to do this is to have a helper around to hand you the needle, but this is not always possible. If he does squirm this could be very dangerous holding a syringe. The best way to do this is to basically sit on them with their body between your legs or get your knee on top and hold them down.

Step 4: Injection

Next is to inject this can be done in the lower half of the neck close to shoulder but not on the shoulder. Stab and inject. Some medicines require certain injection locations but most don’t and can be injected anywhere.

Step 5: Tag

Final task is to tag the calf, number the calf the same as his/her mother put it in the tagger and tag it in the middle of the ear. The tagger works like a needle when a human gets their ear pierced. The sharp end of the tag slides on the needle end and the tagger pushes the sharp end through the ear and retracts out afterwards. Afterwards you let the calf run off and you make sure its doing alright.