Em Nau Farm BLOG

The Benefits of Vitamin C

Recently Heather and I were given a little Santa Gertrudis cross bull calf by one of our neighbours (this calf incidentally was a half brother to “Ruby” one of the calves we had born on our farm last year).  The little fellow was a few days old and had been rejected by his mother and the neighbour didn’t have the time to hand rear the little bloke.

The neighbour gave us a call and said the calf was weak and the neighbour wasn’t sure if the calf had had any colostrum or if it had feed since it was born – did we want him (if not he would put it down).  We said we could take one more and to bring him across.  Well time went by and we were looking up the driveway expecting the neighbour to drive down any minute when we notice Daphne and Beaudette (our two house cows) looking across the paddock – low and behold our neighbour was CARRYING the calf up the hill from the boundary of his and our property.

When we went to feed the little bloke he latched onto the bottle and sucked the guts out of the contents.  He looked like he hadn’t had a drink in a while.

As the week went by “Red”, as we decided to name him, was getting stronger and stronger so we made the decision last Friday morning to let him loose with our other calves on Saturday.  When i got home on Friday afternoon poor old Red was laying prostrate with his tongue hanging out (flies all over him and his tongue) barely breathing.  At first I thought he was dead but a slight twitch of his ear alerted me to the fact he was not.  I checked him for obvious signs of a snake bite or paralysis ticks but found nothing.  I immediately gave him a drink of water from a feeding bottle and he ended up drinking about a litre over an hour period.  After I did the afternoon milking I tried him on a milk/water mix and he consumed another half litre or so.  Over the afternoon I attempted to get him to stand but he couldn’t hold his own weight so I suspected a paralysis tick had got him.  I rechecked him from head to tail, including in his ear canal and around his anus but still could not find any signs of what had bitten him.

Red must have decided that all the work I had been doing to get him to stand was annoying him so he stood by himself and walked out of the shelter, up the hill and settled behind his shelter so he could see the goats and sheep.

When Heather got home about 7PMish she told me she had found three ticks on him that morning but didn’t think they were paralysis ticks.  We resettled Red in his donga for the night and to be honest didn’t expect him to still be alive on Saturday morning.

Saturday morning dawned and Red, although no better, was still alive.  We feed him some water and made the decision to also try Vitamin C (this is a widely used remedy for snake bites in goats).  A previous experience with Vitamin C and tick bite didn’t turn out to well as the Vitamin C had a catastrophic effect on the your calf in questions and she ended up dying.  This time we decided that instead of injecting the Vitamin C we would crush up some tablets and use a syringe to feed Red directly.  Over the next 24 hours we estimate red had about 50-60 Vitamin C tablets, plus his normal water and milk supplements.

Late on Saturday afternoon each time we gave Red a Vitamin C syringe he had a minor fit, where his eyes rolled back in his head, he strained his head backwards and he started trembling (this was very similar to the fit our previous calf had had but she had a major fit – we assume now from such a massive does of Vitamin C all at once) – we believe that the fits were the vitamin C reacting with the tick poison in Red’s system.

When we left him late on Saturday night we once again did not expect him to still be alive on Sunday morning.

When Heather went up about 5:30 on Sunday morning Red had moved from where we had put him the previous night and was sitting looking around his pen.  Over the course of Sunday, although still very weak, he started to gain some strength and he even walked around the house yard for about an hour before settling down for a sleep in the afternoon sun in front of the tool shed.  .

On Monday morning when I was heading off to work at about 4AMish I checked on Red and he was breathing (shallowly) and seemed comfortable so he made it through another night successfully.  We will take each day at a time as Red’s bodily functions have also started to return so we are hoping that he makes a (even if not full) recovery from his tick bite