Hi-tech gizmos may help us in middle of night
TREKKING out to the cowshed in a dressing gown and baffies in the middle of the night in winter – to check on a cow close to calving – is a chilly experience.
And while I used to believe that I was the only one suffering from the 3am break to my night’s shut-eye, my wife’s recent nightly sojourns to check her pony – which is close to producing a foal – has given me a greater appreciation of the thermal shock which icy body parts can have on the poor soul who has kept the bed warm.
The idea of installing some sort of video link-up has always had some appeal – and while CCTV in the cowshed used to be a bit of a pipe dream, there are now several companies offering commercial solutions to the annoying habit of most animals to produce during the darkest – and coldest – hours of the night.
They’re quite expensive though, and I’m pretty sure that somebody with a wee bit of knowledge could soon adapt some of the cheaper security camera systems which seem to be available these days.
But other ways of knowing when a cow is due to calf have been developed recently as well.
One of the latest inventions has been a device which, when strapped to the tail of a cow that’s getting near calving, will send a text alert to the farmer about an hour before the birth is due.
It works by sensing how much the cow wags her tail – apparently this increases as she gets closer to calving.
Again, the gizmos aren’t cheap to buy and they also have an annual fee – but against the value of a cow and a calf, some might see £300 as a worthwhile investment, especially as it can let the farmer get on with other work.
Now I doubt that anyone would buy one for every cow in their herd – they would have one or two and put them on the cows they thought were closest to calving and then move it on to the next after she’d given birth.
Of course, as many have found with cattle eartags, no matter how carefully you apply things to an animal’s appendage, they sometimes fall off.
The software accounts for this though – and if the monitor falls to the ground, it will send a text alert to inform the farmer.
However, if this happens in the middle of the night, the farmer then faces the prospect of getting his/her assets frozen while hunting around the cowshed trying to find the expensive gizmo in among the straw in the dark ...