Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [26]
I assume the cows had a similar reaction.
Dad would hang a paper tag from the rafter behind the cow he wanted serviced. After locating the tag, the inseminator stopped behind the cow, drew on a shoulder-length plastic glove, and stepped across the gutter. After patting the cow to calm her, he grabbed her tail, hoisted it, and from then on the whole deal was very personal.
I can’t say the cows ever appeared overly distressed by what certainly had to be a disruption in their day. They would pause in chewing their cud, kinda freezing in a “hunh?” sorta pose, and their eyes would bulge a tad, about like yours would at the point of realizing your taxes were due yesterday. Occasionally one would engage in a little do-si-do (who wouldn’t?), but all things considered, their reaction to having a stranger’s arm elbow-deep up the rectum was positively restrained.
I have met a great number of artificial inseminators over the years, and they are nearly always cheery about their profession. Apparently a career spent operating at less than arm’s length from the place where the miracle of life and its base by-products intersect engenders a certain jocular pragmatism. One of our inseminators was pleasant enough, but at the feed mill there were rumors of his drinking. Perhaps so, said Dad, who abhorred alcohol in all its forms. But we had also just come through a stretch in which the allegedly drunken inseminator settled twenty-four cows on the first try, and twenty-three of those cows had heifer calves. If that man was drinking, Dad said, paraphrasing the apocrypha of Lincoln on Grant, we better find out what and get him some more.
We observe our heroes and emulate accordingly. When my brother Jed was still in training pants, Mom found him with his arm wrapped in a plastic bread bag and jammed inside a roll of butcher paper. He had a green Tinkertoy rod crossways in his teeth and was patting the butcher paper to calm it before delivering the coup de grâce.
There are chicken books in the bathroom, Backyard Poultry clippings on the bedside stand, and coop sketches scattered around my desk. Anneliese is in the spirit as well, quoting from Chickens: Tending a Small-Scale Flock for Pleasure and Profit and referencing the chicken tractors of Joel Salatin. But I am also prone to nattering on about where we’ll put the pigs, and how maybe we should fence off a patch for a pair of beef cows, and how I read in Countryside & Small Stock Journal that goat meat is gaining popularity, and also wouldn’t it be terrific to fence the yard for sheep and save the gas money? I know I said at the outset all I wanted was some eggs and perhaps a slice of homegrown ham, but here we are with thirty-seven fallow acres….
I keep trying to rein myself in. It’s not far from champing at the bit and biting off more than you can chew. We have a smallish tractor here on the farm, and yesterday the battery went dead. No problem. I pulled the pickup truck beside it, hooked up the jumper cables, and—rather than rev the engine impatiently—went off to multitask while the battery charged. When I returned ten minutes later, the interior of the shed was a haze of toxic smoke and the battery was fizzing like a junior high science project. There are only two ways to hook up a battery—the right way and the wrong way—and the right way is color coded. So now I had to replace the battery. I couldn’t find the correct wrench, and the one matching socket I located was stripped. That meant I had to pry the battery loose using cheap vise grips and a screwdriver. The cold morning air rang with curses.
I finally