Saturday, December 08, 2007

Veterinary Question

Caleb, maybe one of the bovine vets could enlighten me. I could've emailed you with this but I figured a blog post would kill two birds with one stone.

The vet checked a cow pregnant at 75 days. At 92 days, she came into heat. Three possibilities:
1) She wasn't pregnant. Very not likely. No heats seen, and anybody should be able to detect a 75 day pregnancy.
2) She had a spontaneous abortion. Not likely and highly coincidental. I've seen this ~ 17 day post preg check return to heat before.
3) The vet caused a traumatic abortion. One of my questions is: Is 17 days long enough to return to heat? Well, now that I think about it, of course it is. Cows often have heats 10-12 days postpartum.

I should just stop doing pregnancy checks.

2 comments:

Mom said...

Are traumatic abortions really that easy to cause? It seems odd. I remember being told, in early pregnancy, that the babies were so deeply shielded that not much could touch them. Perhaps not so much, for cows?

Dad said...

I'm sure they're equally shieded. Human uteri are not palpated for pregnancy.

The vets say, "Oh it wasn't me. It was something else." I've seen it so many times. It's them.

I'll have to look into Ultrasound.