A Little Fetal Stress

Never hurt anyone?



No, that's not mine, it's a picture from an Idaho sheep station I helped lamb at 2 years ago.  The lamb is yellow because it's covered in meconium (fetal poop).  Stress to the fetus such as that caused by oxygen deprivation causes the baby whatever to poop in utero.  When attending a birthing and you see yellow fluid coming out of the mother, you often worry that the baby is dying or already has died.

So I had a calving call two days ago, and when I reached in I felt a breech (butt only, no legs in the birth canal).  Like so:

Integrated Livestock Management - Colorado State U

A breech is an emergency, the calf can't be born that way.  The legs need to be brought in the birth canal.  Even if the legs are naturally presented in the birth canal, the delivery of a backward calf is often too slow to allow for calf survival.  The umbilical cord breaks or pinches off while the head is still inside the cow.  In a calf that's coming forward, the head engaging the cervix allows for proper dilation and a timely delivery.  Even if the umbilical cord breaks before the calf has been expelled, the head is out and the calf can breathe on it's own.

OK, in my mind I'm thinking: not good.  After feeling the breech, the second thing I noted was that the amniotic sac had not yet ruptured, so I poked it with my finger to allow for manipulation of the calf.  You can't grab onto something that's inside a bubble of fluid, so breaking the sac let me get my hands on the calf. 

That's when yellow spewed out.

Very not good.

It took a bit of work, but I finally got it corrected with 2 back legs in the birth canal, ready to come out.  This is what I was covered in by the time I had calf-pulling chains around each leg:

Picture this, but head to toe.  Yes, even on my face...

a lot of good stuff happens at my face-level.

Together with a farm hand we pulled the calf out, yellow as can be.  When it hit the ground I knelt down to check it over, and the little bugger almost kicked me in the gut!  A vigorous heifer calf who beat the odds :)

It might not seem like much, but this made my entire week!  Sure it was luck, but it made me feel good that I could help out.  I wish they all were happy endings.