Steers receive chiropractic care

I have been meaning to write a followup about our progress since the chiropractic visit, so here goes.

I don’t regret spending the money one bit. My near steer Abe is a whole new animal. He still lags a little on rough ground, but I think that his front feet are honestly slightly more tender than his brothers. When I get them out on sod or soil now he is the one that I have to ask to slow down.

I brought them to my county fair and to the DAPNet Annual Gathering and they did really well in both situations. At the fair we would take the stone boat all the way down to the trailer parking area to get hay and straw for the day and we generally found something new to deal with every morning.

This past weekend I had the chance to do different work with them at the gathering that I don’t have the opportunity to try at home, mostly because of the lack of this type of work or patient help at home. So we challenged them with a couple bigger logs and gave them plenty of light ones in between, they did really well for their age. We also plowed 2 furrows with my little plow, it was certainly a big pull for them, they had lots of breaks and it was a team effort to get the plow adjusted and working well. The next day they pulled a cultipacker over a patch of ground that was seeded to oats for a cover crop. We had a bratty moment or two but overall I couldn’t have asked them to have been any better. They slept a lot the next day and are happy, healthy and completely sound.

One interesting thing that I learned is that Abe’s pelvis is one of his conformational flaws and predisposes him to soundness issues as well as a less than ideal gate. A woman present at our “Ox Talk” is a former dairy cattle judge and did a really good job explaining this to the group, I certainly learned a lot.

So now they are the sound ones and I am the lame one with a heel spur, if it tames down later I am sure that they will be up to the task of moving some hay and manure.

In dairy judging lingo the hip bones are called the hooks and the protruding bones on either side of the tail are the pins. Here is a reference diagram, http://www.sites.ext.vt.edu/virtualfarm/dairy/dairy_cow.html. In this diagram the cow’s hooks are slightly higher than the pins and this used to be ideal. From my recollection of this weekend this configuration of the pelvis is conducive to an easier birth due a downward sloping birth canal.

Of course modern show trends have driven humans to fiddle with genetics to make the hooks and pins almost level in a quest for a straighter top line. So there are a number of animals that have started to shift the other way with pins being higher than the hooks. This uphill (from the fetuses point of view) slant of the pelvis makes birth more difficult and puts a strain on all of the tendons, ligaments and joints from there downwards toward the hooves, basically setting the rear legs off balance from the hip down.

My off steer is closer to level with a tendency to have the hooks higher and has a fairly nice steady stride, but my near steer Abe with the bad pelvis (pins tending to be higher than his hooks) really has to work at moving out, his legs twist with every stride and he is less fluid (graceful) than his brother.

The chiropractor mentioned that some cattle get a little twisted in the birth canal and just need some help to straighten out, some get out of place from trauma and some are prone to becoming misaligned from flaws in confirmation. My hopes are that it will not take more than a visit every year or two to keep Abe sound and moving as comfortably as possible.

Interestingly I learned that our chiropractor has a chiropractor friend in Iowa who works on horses and show cattle, there is never enough time in her week to get to all of the cattle, she has had to turn many customers away. These are the type of cattle farms that have air conditioned barns for show beef cattle that travel all over the country. So I guess working on cattle is nothing new, just not practiced much here in the northeast.