Wow, it's always a day of adventure over at the the dairy
First of all, one of my coworkers was nearly crushed to death by an over anxious cow. Due to our protocol for handling sick cows (healthies get milked first, sick last), some how a sick cow tried to sneak into the giant milking aparatus by running really fast. He ended up pinned between some ridgid metal bars and a half ton pregnant lactating bovine mommy for about a minute. Luckily he wasn't seriously injured, but he kept passing out several times in a row for about a half hour afterwards. I would too after being constricted by one of those things.
Secondly, March and February seems to be a good time for all the heifers to decide to drop their calves. For us this means performing chain-assisted child birth. In most cases, heifers have difficulty becoming cows, that is delivering their young and becoming mothers for the first time. Usually the best way to assist them in this process is through the use of chains, and a pair of good hands. To make a long story short, they make the calf's pelvis line up as good as possible with the mother's then attach chains to the calve's legs and pull while the mother pushes. Not a pretty picture at all
#176 gave birth to a 92lb bull calf, which I had the pleasure of separting from her 8 hours after its birth. The mother, who I had seen earlier in the milking parlor was covered totally in afterbirth, her jowels pink colored from the umbilicus she just snacked on. I grabbed the little quivering thing and tossed it onto the back of one of the farm pickups, for drop off at the calf barn. Freshly born calves, or after birth, or what ever the mother and the calf were covered in, smell like a combination of a gust of salty New Jersey sea air and slight hint of CK One, very slight. I wouldn't be surpised if that is the secret ingredient in CK One, considering that stuff like ambergris is used in that kind of stuff all the time