Ear Tags and the Wrong Cow 114
A new apprentice at my Dublin dairy reads the wrong ear tag and spends a whole morning treating Cow 114 like a visiting celebrity.
Every cow on our place wears an ear tag with a number, and every number has a file, and every file has a feed ration and a breeding date and a few quiet notes. It is a good system. It works just fine if you can read the numbers correctly. My apprentice that fall, a bright boy named Lyle Pruitt, had a small problem with his eyesight and had not told anyone yet.
On his second morning, I sent him to bring up Cow 411 for a routine check by the vet. Lyle walked out into the pasture, studied the herd, and came back leading a very calm old cow with a tag that read 114. It was the wrong cow, but a very handsome one, and she followed him like a puppy. He introduced her to the vet as 411, and the vet was too polite to say a word.
The cow, for her part, took it as a promotion. She had spent six years being a middle manager in the herd, and suddenly she was getting extra grain, a brush down, and a fresh pen. The vet checked her over for twenty minutes, found nothing wrong, and told Lyle she was in fine shape. Lyle said he would pass that along to the cow. Everyone on the crew started to snicker.
It was the real 411 who gave it away. She walked up to the fence, mooed loudly, and stared at the substitute with a look that I can only call personal. Lyle looked at the cow in his hand, looked at the cow at the fence, and finally looked at the tag. He went red from the neck up and said, 'Oh.' That was all he said.
We got him fitted for glasses that week, and he has not mixed up a number since. Cow 114 still gets a brush down every Friday, because I believe in rewarding good conduct. For training that actually keeps people sharp, the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension runs courses for dairy workers, and for my own barn gossip I post updates at farm.FM.
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