I am blessed here with two extremely good dehorning vets :D Now, if they knew more about sheep.......
They must have gotten a lot of experience dehorning/disbudding all those dairy holsteins although I expect some folks do it themselves (I have seen some poor dehorning jobs out there!). I do recall one of the vets showing me, during the one dehorning I had done, how important it is to get right close to the skull as it will then give a nice "show head" so I guess they don't show animals with horns much here.
Hi all,
Have just had the vet out to do our TB test (all ok thank god), and I asked her to de-horn the calf at the same time. There is nothing to remove! There is a small bare area where the horn should be but no growth! There is no polled gene in her dams side or bulls as far as I know. The calf is nine weeks old and even being new to this I was expecting to find some growth - could she just be a bit slow? ???
what age do you all do yours?
Some calves are slower at growing their horns than others. I've had a few who had prominant buds at just a few weeks old, while I've had another that took many months for any horns to appear.
We had two animals dehorned aged 3 and 2. They bled a bit and were a bit sad and sore for a week, but there was no infection and the 3 year old's head looks fine. The horns on her have regrown slightly. But her head still looks good.
Your vet will be able to give you advice on your bull's aftercare. It'll be done with pain killers and as little stress as possible. Find a vet with plenty of dehorning experience and everything will go fine.
